Itron Inc. has shipped more than 1 million Sentinel solid-state commercial and industrial (C&I) meters. Additionally, shipments in 2007 for the Sentinel meter were 15 percent higher than 2006.

The Sentinel is an accurate solid-state, polyphase meter that was designed for high-end C&I customers, including industrial sites, stadiums, hospitals and substations. The meter was introduced five years ago and replaced the Vectron, which was a leader in the solid-state meter industry for 11 years. The Sentinel was built to provide affordable state-of-the art polyphase metering technology on a flexible platform for easy upgrade and enhancement to meet industry demands for improved accuracy, reliability and cost-effectiveness for C&I customers.

With roughly 18 million C&I customers in the market, a milestone of one million commercial and industrial meters shipped is a significant accomplishment, says Rust. Nearly a half-million C&I meters were shipped in 2007, an Itron record.

The Sentinel has many features and functions including load profile read/energy usage retrieval (retrieves and transmits interval data for up to eight unique energy values); register and billing reads; load profile near term interval read (used to monitor usage during load curtailment or real time pricing premium period events); power outage and power restoration alarms (transmitting a last gasp notification when detecting and AC power outage at the metering point); meter diagnostics (and tamper detection) alerts and meter clock monitoring and correction, and other functions. The adaptable architecture integrates easily into existing systems and provides a long life of low maintenance, efficient operation and extremely flexible upgrade capability.