The chargers we were issued took five minutes per meter. I reverse-engineered one, built a replacement, and cut the charge time to twenty seconds.
That single number set the pace of the whole smart gas meter reconnection programme for Enaon EDA and Italgas, via MeterTech Solutions. You can read about the programme on the Work page.
The problem: five minutes per meter
With our crew sizes and daily targets, that number capped the whole programme. Not the driving, not the paperwork, not the reconnection itself.
The usual response is to buy more chargers. We costed it. It was expensive, and it didn’t solve the real problem: five minutes of dead time per meter, multiplied by everything.
What I did
I opened one up.
I reverse-engineered the board, designed a replacement PCB and printed an enclosure. Then I tested it against the meters we actually had, not the ones the datasheet assumed.
The result
Twenty seconds, down from five minutes. We built 76.
What to take from it
The real takeaway isn’t the hardware. The constraint everyone planned around arrived in a box with a specification on it, and nobody had checked whether it was load-bearing.
Most programme bottlenecks I’ve been handed since share the same shape.
If a number like this sets the pace of a programme you run, see what I take on or get in touch.