Accessing Your Email from Home

At one of the Director’s Brown Bag lunches, a question came up about accessing email from home computers or being able to turn on your Out of Office notice from a remote location.

To do this, open your Internet browser and type in https://webmail.richmondgov.com. A blue sign-in screen will appear. Indicate if you are using a private or public computer (public would be, for instance, one at a library where other people would be using the machine after you).

Type in the same user name and password you normally use to log in at work, except add a richva/ to the front of your user name.

An email window will open. It does not look exactly like the Outlook you use at work, but you can read and reply to emails and check your calendar. You can turn on the Out of Office Assistant under Options on the bottom lefthand side. You can also change your password.

Old browsers like Netscape 3.0 or below or Explorer 6 or below probably will not work, and Explorer 6 is no longer supported by Microsoft. You can update home browsers to the latest version for free. Popup blocking must be disabled for the page and cookies enabled, which you can do through the Internet tools menu.

Meter Reading -- It's All Done Electronically Now

Imagine driving by every single home, apartment and business in the city of Richmond, Henrico County all the way to the Goochland county line, and parts of Hanover every single month – at 20 mph?

That’s what the 11 employees of the city of Richmond Department of Public Utilities’ Meter Reading Department do in order to electronically collect the data necessary to send out accurate water and gas bills to customers.

Years ago, it was an even more daunting task when meters were manually read by gas and water service technicians who had to walk into every yard to read the meter. With the advent of computers, a city vehicle equipped with a mobile data collector can record the readings transmitted by antennas on gas and water meters as the vehicle slowly passes the location.

As each neighborhood is scanned block by block, the computer shows the meters that were missed and each missed location is immediately revisited. If the meter still doesn’t register, a gas and water service technician visits the location the following day to investigate and fix the problem. Typical problems include old antenna batteries – they have an average lifespan of 7-10 years, the water meter well is flooded from a recent rain, or the customer has cut or damaged the wire to the antenna.

A typical day’s route might drive by 8,500 meters and take as long as 10 hours to complete. On some routes, it’s necessary to drive through alleyways behind houses or pull into driveways in order to pick up the signal.

Typical types of antennas found on water and gas meters.

A service technician loads a computer with the day's route on it into the data collector strapped to the passenger seat.

A laptop computer keeps the service technician updated with meters that failed to register and need to be read again.

Instead of a service technician in your yard, you're more likely to catch a glimpse of a city vehicle driving slowly down your street on meter-reading day.