CRANBERRY TWP — The long-awaited project to replace more than 8,000 water meters in Cranberry has begun.

Workers with Newman Plumbing, the township’s installation contractor for the project, started replacing meters in homes on Wednesday.

Township director of public works Jason Dailey said workers are installing about 16 to 18 meters a day, but hope to get up to 25 a day.

“We expect 600 to 1,000 meters to be installed a month,” Dailey said.

The replacement is expected to take 14 months, Dailey said. Newman Plumbing, based in Zelienople, is replacing 7,000 residential water meters, and township staff is replacing the remaining 1,400 commercial water meters.

The $3.5 million project to replace about 8,400 meters has been in the works since last year, when the township began upgrading infrastructure, bidding out the installation and purchasing meters.

The goal is to replace all water meters installed before 2009 to improve service, Dailey said. Billing will be more accurate as all monthly readings will be actual instead of estimated. The current practice is to read a meter once every two months and estimate in between.

The new meters allow usage data to be transmitted to the office. They do not require a worker to actually visit the site, saving time and money.

Dailey said it takes between five to seven days for three workers to read meters in half the township.

Customers also can sign up for alerts that let them know if usage is unusually high compared to previous months, which could mean there’s a leak, Dailey said.

Other area municipalities have had success with upgrading their water meters. Mario Leone, manager of Monaca Borough in Beaver County, said it replaced 2,400 residential, commercial and industrial water meters with the new wireless units in 2012.

The upgrade has greatly increased operational efficiency for the borough, Leone said, freeing up time for water department workers to do more preventive maintenance on the system instead of taking time to manually read meters each quarter. It’s also freed up time for the administrative worker to do other work — he used to spend a month inputting the data from manual meter reads for billing.

It has also saved customers money with its leak detection capabilities.

“I can’t speak strongly enough about the benefits of it,” Leone said of the wireless meters. “It’s just something that with today’s technology, how water authorities operate without it, it just doesn’t make sense.”

In Cranberry, Newman Plumbing is moving from neighborhood to neighborhood replacing meters, starting with Autumn Hill, Hampshire Woods, Blue Ridge and Freedom Woods. Creekwood Commons, Creekwood, Woodlands and Woodlands Estates, Cranbrook/Manorline and Sun Valley are next in line.

Residents will get notifications in the mail when it is time for their neighborhood to begin scheduling appointments to get their meter replaced. Contractors need an adult to be home while they replace the meter. Weekday and Saturday appointments are available.

Replacing the old meter with the new unit takes about 20 to 30 minutes. Dailey said residents are asked to make sure the water meter is accessible for the technicians to work on.