Itron Brand Guidelines: The 1977 Hauser Lake Meter-Reading Start-Up Now in Liberty Lake

A handful of engineers and a handheld reader.

Itron began in 1977 in northern Idaho. The company’s own timeline says it was founded by a small group of engineers in Hauser Lake, Idaho, who wanted more efficient ways to read meters, and the Spokane Journal of Business reported in August 2014 that the idea came from six engineers working out of a Hauser Lake garage. With seed money from Washington Water Power Co., the Spokane utility now called Avista Corp., they built a handheld device that let a worker pick up a meter’s reading by radio while walking past, the Journal reported; in 2019 the same paper described Itron as a spinoff of Avista.

The first products were about paperwork. The company history in the International Directory of Company Histories, written around 2004 and republished by FundingUniverse, says Itron began shipping its first systems in 1980: portable handheld computers and software for what was called electronic meter reading, so that readers could key in figures instead of writing them on paper sheets. In 1991 it introduced its first automatic meter reading system, built around radio modules fitted to electricity, gas and water meters, which it called ERT modules, for encoder, receiver, transmitter.

In December 1995 the five-millionth ERT went to Philadelphia Gas Works, the same history says; by then the company was based in Spokane, with manufacturing there and in Minnesota and subsidiaries in the United Kingdom, France and Australia. The late 1990s were harder. The history describes delayed orders and losses, a cut of 100 jobs in July 1998, and a turnaround under Michael Chesser, appointed chief executive in May 1999, who consolidated manufacturing from Washington and Idaho into one plant in Waseca, Minnesota. Itron’s shares trade on Nasdaq under the symbol ITRI.

Buying the meter makers.

Itron grew by acquisition. In 1995 it bought Metscan, which read meters over telephone lines, and in 1996 Utility Translation Systems of Raleigh, North Carolina, whose MV-90 software collected data from commercial and industrial meters, according to the FundingUniverse history and Itron’s timeline. In 2002 and 2003 it added software firms including Linesoft of Spokane and Silicon Energy. In July 2003 it agreed to buy the electricity metering business of the oilfield services group Schlumberger, based in Oconee, South Carolina; Itron’s timeline dates the completion to 2004.

That deal brought a long lineage of hardware. Itron’s timeline folds in the history of Schlumberger’s metering subsidiaries, formed in 1977 as Flonic for water, heat and gas, Enertec for electricity and Sereg for industrial control. Schlumberger bought further meter makers in Europe — Allmess Congermania in Germany and Conteuro Rigas in Italy in 1987, Thorn EMI Gas Metering in Britain and Bosco in Italy in 1989, Heliowatt and Danyl in Germany in 1993, and AEG’s meter business in 1995 — and in 2001 left metering through a leveraged buyout that created the Actaris group, the timeline says. Itron bought Actaris Metering Systems, which the Spokane Journal of Business described as Luxembourg-based, in 2007, adding gas and water meters to its range. Product lines from that inheritance include the Gallus gas meter and the CENTRON residential electricity meter, which Schlumberger launched in 1998, according to the timeline.

The network era followed. In 2010 Itron and Cisco formed an alliance to bring internet protocol communications to smart-grid networks, the timeline says, and in 2012 Itron bought SmartSynch of Jackson, Mississippi, for cellular communications, the Spokane Journal reported. In January 2018 it completed its purchase of Silver Spring Networks, the smart-grid networking company, and renamed it Itron Networked Solutions, a new business segment, T&D World reported on 11 January 2018; the Silver Spring platform included a smart street-light offering. The timeline names Itron’s smart-grid platform OpenWay and its edge-computing technology Riva.

Meters, networks and dashboards.

Utility meters are everywhere and rarely looked at. They sit in cupboards and basements, in pits under the pavement and in boxes on outside walls, and today they are read far more often by machines than by people. The makers in this guide build electricity, water, gas and heat meters, and increasingly the radio networks and software that collect and manage their readings.

Their imagery follows that shift. Factory photographs show rows of grey and white meters clamped into test rigs, brass water-meter bodies waiting for assembly and the dials of mechanical registers. Newer material shows small digital displays and communication modules, and control-room screens where a utility follows consumption, outages and the state of its network across a town or a region. Product shots tend to sit on plain light backgrounds, close in spirit to the technical drawings of a catalogue.

People appear mostly as installers and operators: field engineers beside liveried utility vans, technicians opening a meter cabinet or lifting the lid of a water-meter pit, staff in front of dashboards. Trade fairs such as Enlit, where the power industry meets, and national utility shows are where these companies present themselves to their customers, and their stands lean on the same mix of hardware, maps and screens.

Ownership in the sector has changed often, with listed groups, private equity investors and family firms buying and selling meter businesses across borders. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it now and where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Liberty Lake and the Avista lineage.

Itron is now headquartered in Liberty Lake, Washington, east of Spokane, as the Spokane Journal of Business reported in 2014 and again in 2019. In July 2019 the paper reported that the board had named Tom Deitrich, chief operating officer since 2015, as president and chief executive from August that year, succeeding Philip Mezey, who had led the company since 2013. It counted 465 employees in Spokane County and about 8,140 more worldwide as of late 2018.

The business has moved a long way from the handheld reader. In 2014 a company executive told the Journal that meter readers were now a small part of what Itron did, and that the focus was software, services and networks for utilities and cities. English Wikipedia describes its range as electricity, gas, water and thermal energy meters, control technology, communications systems, software and managed and consulting services. In 2013 Itron became a founding member of the Smart Cities Council, its timeline says.

For a design guide, Itron shows a meter maker whose single name now covers its own first handheld readers, Schlumberger’s meter lines and Silver Spring’s networks. Compare Landis+Gyr, the Swiss meter maker that passed through a long chain of owners, and Xylem, the American water-technology group. For this guide we use a deep slate blue, a meter grey and a signal green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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