New Mexico Gas Co. this week began retrofitting natural-gas meters from Belen to Santa Fe with devices that will allow utility workers to read meters remotely with the help of a laptop computer.

If all goes as planned, by early next year your monthly gas bill will be based on remote readings rather than the work of traditional meter readers who go onto a customer's property.

The company says only five "data-collection agents," cruising in vehicles with laptops that receive and record readings on gas usage, will be needed to read all meters in central New Mexico, including Santa Fe, Albuquerque and Belen.

For the last year and a half, those meters have been read by 75 "manual" meter readers from Public Service Company of New Mexico who read both electric and gas meters.

PNM has continued to read gas meters under a contract since early last year when it sold the gas utility to Continental Energy Systems of Troy, Mich., for $620 million and created New Mexico Gas Co. to run the operation.

PNM, founded in 1917 as Albuquerque's gas and electric utility, first sold its gas utility to Southern Union Gas Co. of Dallas in 1949, then reacquired it in 1985 as part of a settlement in a federal antitrust case against Southern Union.

New Mexico Gas Co. President Tom Domme said the new meter-reading system, which should go into effect Feb. 1 — when the company's contract with PNM ends — will mean savings for both the company and its customers.

Most significantly, he said, it will mean fewer estimated bills — a common practice in Santa Fe where meter readers often skip monthly readings in harsh winter weather. When the estimates result in overcharges, the company credits the customer's account. Undercharges are made up by adding amounts to future bills.

But the system draws complaints. The company recently began sending some customers forms to use in reading their own meters.

Domme said customers aren't likely to notice the change in their meters. "We take (off) the little face plate that has the little dials on it now," he said. "We put this ERT (encoder receiver transmitter) on the meter and then we put the manual dials back on, so what you see is not very different at all from what is there right now."

Tru-Check Meter Service Inc. is the contractor retrofitting the Santa Fe area's 48,000 commercial and residential gas meters. Its 90 installers carry badges identifying them as contractors to New Mexico Gas Co.

"Most of these installations are done without the customer being there," Domme said. "If we have access to the meter, then we make the change and you don't even know it's done. It takes about 10 or 15 minutes."

Domme said it should take through November to retrofit all the meters, and two more months of testing to make sure manual and electronic readings coincide, before beginning all-electronic reads by Feb. 1.

The devices will transmit data via radio signals that can be read on a laptop computer in a car traveling down a nearby street. Most of the city water meters in Santa Fe have been read that way since 2004. Domme said 54 percent of gas meters in the entire country already are read remotely.

New Mexico Gas Co. will seek approval from the New Mexico Public Regulation Committee to pass along the $23 million in capital costs for the new system to ratepayers. But Domme said customers eventually will see savings on their bill from a reduction in the $3 million-a-year PNM contract, although he would not estimate how much.

The change affects about 340,000 of New Mexico Gas Co.'s total 500,000 customers. The other 160,000 customers, in towns outside of the Belen to Santa Fe corridor, will continue to have their meters read by meter readers who work directly for New Mexico Gas Co.

As for PNM, the state's largest electric utility will continue to read its electric meters the old way. Company spokeswoman Cathy Garber said a PNM subsidiary, Texas-New Mexico Power Co., which supplies electricity to parts of the Houston area and in far West Texas but no longer in New Mexico, already uses devices that funnel meter readings to a central point via cellular transmissions and can even turn the power on and off remotely.

"The issue we have is that in New Mexico, it's an expensive thing to do, so customers would have to bear that cost," she said. "We'd have to get public regulatory approval and, realistically, in this economic environment, particularly since we're already filing for a rate increase, to get even more money approved, to get even more costs approved that the customers would have to bear, is just not realistic."