NextCentury Meters (Logan, UT) offers a water meter providing users with data about water usage, including specific locations of leaks. Adam Paul was honored by EY as Entrepreneur of the Year for the Mountain West.
NextCentury Meters, located in Logan, Utah, has designed and manufactures a novel water meter that provide consumers with detailed information about their water usage. The company currently offers their meters to privately-owned apartment complexes. The company will soon offer their novel meters to municipalities.
NextCentury Meters goes beyond merely measuring water usage and detecting leaks. They also detect the difference between a leaky toilet, a leaky water heater, or any other malfunctioning devices, providing that information to the user.
“Our drive is finding an effective solution for water conservation, and an effective solution for lowering utility payments,” said NextCentury Meters President and CEO Adam Paul.
He explained that NextCentury Meters allows homeowners and apartment residents to know quickly exactly how much water they’re using. ”Users can know at any point if they’re saving water or using more water, instead of waiting till the end of the month to know their water usage.”
Paul grew up in a double-wide trailer in Nevada, where he learned to make money by mowing neighbors’ lawns and selling plastic grocery bags for a penny. To make money for his family, he eventually joined YESCO in Logan, Utah, while attending Utah State University studying electrical engineering. YESCO underwent major restructuring. Paul was part of the resulting layoffs. To provide for his family, he dropped out of USU and began working in general IT for a company that specializes in utility billing for multi-family homes.
Paul conceived the idea of NextCentury Meters from a conversation with one of the owners of a multi-family home. The complex had sub-metering equipment for each unit to allow tenants in individual units to be billed for their share of utilities. However, the building owner said the sub-metering equipment was sub-standard in quality and user-friendliness. Paul decided that he’d create a solution to this problem.
However, having dropped out of USU, Paul lacked the expertise required to create the product he envisioned. Undeterred, Paul taught himself coding skills. He designed the circuit board for the receiver that he would eventually use to send usage data to the future software platform. NextCentury Meters slowly grew into what it has become today.
"I remember us sitting down and saying, ‘wouldn't it be crazy if someday we had 50,000 devices checking into our system annually?’ Now, we add about 50,000 devices every month into our system," Paul shared with TechBuzz.
He highlighted some of the dangers of home water leaks. Though important, it is not just about conserving water, "when you're able to stop a leak, you may prevent a house flood. You are also preventing potential damage to your home's foundation."
NextCentury Meters has helped apartment complex residents save over 23 billion gallons of water in 2022—the equivalent of 35 thousand Olympic sized swimming pools. It has also saved over 26 billion gallons in 2023 alone. NextCentury’s goal is to conserve over 100 billion gallons of water by 2026.
Recently Paul was honored by EY as 2024 Entrepreneur of the Year for the Mountain West region.
Founded in 1986, Entrepreneur of the Year has celebrated more than 11,000 ambitious visionaries who are leading successful, dynamic businesses in the US, and it has since expanded to nearly 60 countries globally. The program honors many different types of business leaders for their ingenuity, courage and entrepreneurial spirit, and celebrates original founders who bootstrapped their business from inception or who raised outside capital to grow their company; transformational CEOs who infused innovation into an existing organization to catapult its trajectory; and multigenerational family business leaders who reimagined a legacy business model to fortify it for the future.
The Entrepreneur Of The Year Mountain West program includes Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. Adam Fife, CEO of CenCore (Springville, UT) was also an Entrepreneur of the Year honoree for 2024, as covered by TechBuzz. The Entrepreneur Of The Year National Overall Award winner is selected in November. That person will represent the US as they compete for the World Entrepreneur Of The Year Award in June 2025.
“NextCentury Meters is a solution for our communities and the world. It will continue thrive and play a role in addressing water shortages in the Mountain West. We don't want the Great Salt Lake to dry up,” said Grace Schultz, Entrepreneur of the Year Mountain West Program Manager.
Learn more about NextCentury Meters by clicking here.