Kamstrup: Utility meters, remote reading and analytics for energy and water

Overview

Kamstrup combines physical metering with communication networks and software for water, heat, cooling and electricity. Its instruments serve both utilities and building operators, where the same measurements may support consumption allocation, billing and maintenance. The practical distinction is between measuring a quantity at the pipe or supply and moving that measurement into a useful operational system.

The MULTICAL 603 illustrates the heat-meter side of that offering. It supports programmable logs at intervals from minutes to years and can be used with appropriate flow and temperature sensors. This produces more useful diagnostic information than a single cumulative energy total alone.

Offering

The MULTICAL 603 supports modular communications and configurable logging for heat and cooling applications. Its mixed-fluid variant compensates for the fluid's specific heat capacity, while the documented Auto Detect function works with suitable ULTRAFLOW sensors. These are different selection considerations from simply choosing a pipe diameter.

For water networks, flowIQ 2200 combines ultrasonic measurement with acoustic leak indicators. The meter reports a daily minimum noise value to help distinguish persistent pipe noise from ordinary activity. READy supplies the reading layer, with mobile, network and wired approaches for collecting meter data and making it available for operational use.

Technology

Communications are model and module choices. The MULTICAL 603 page lists options including M-Bus, wireless M-Bus, Modbus, BACnet, linkIQ and cellular communications, rather than one interface fitted identically to every meter. The Modbus/KMP TCP/IP module document gives a more concrete integration path for supported MULTICAL 403, 603 and 803 instruments, including its register mapping and additional pulse inputs.

flowIQ 2200 also offers several reading arrangements. Gateway-mediated interfaces must be distinguished from the meter's integrated radio. Selecting the data package, power arrangement and reading infrastructure is therefore part of commissioning.

Independent test records show how far that interface evidence reaches. The DLMS User Association issued certificate 2203 in September 2019 for an OMNIPOWER electricity meter (type 1165-AD2): 2,084 COSEM tests passed and none failed, with high-level GMAC authentication and global ciphering in scope. In October 2025 VDE published a product data sheet confirming OMS conformity for the flowIQ 2200 wireless M-Bus module at 868 MHz with security profile D. For German water utilities Kamstrup also supplies a LoRaWAN meter with TLS encryption, developed with GELSENWASSER AG and PHYSEC; the company reports that the design follows the protection profiles and technical guidelines of the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). Each certificate covers the tested firmware and module only.

Customers

Markets

Kamstrup's READy material describes a joint water and district-heating reading network at Assens in Denmark. Sharing radio infrastructure across the two utilities is a useful example of a project decision that concerns the reading system, not just the meter. It can influence installation effort and how operations teams access their data.

In water distribution, flowIQ 2200 examples describe using acoustic readings to prioritise leak investigations. Building and industrial projects have a different emphasis: the MULTICAL 603 application guidance discusses consumption records and load profiles for property managers and industry. Meter choice should follow that intended use, with billing and diagnostic needs considered together.

Public utility records give a sense of scale. El Paso Water's Public Service Board approved a sole-source contract in January 2025 for Kamstrup AMI meters, supplied through the distributor Ferguson Enterprises, at an estimated $17,000,000 a year, so that a systemwide meter replacement could finish in four years instead of ten. An August 2025 agenda item reports that the ultrasonic meters improved metering accuracy, leak detection and billing efficiency, and asks the board to raise the current contract year to an estimated $42,000,000. In Germany, GELSENWASSER AG awarded Kamstrup 50,000 LoRaWAN TLS water meters after an EU-wide tender in December 2023, with around 180,000 meters planned to move to LoRaWAN by the end of 2028. Earlier, in 2016, water-link in Antwerp contracted about 193,000 MULTICAL 21 meters with Sigfox communication through Hydroko, which WaterWorld reported as Kamstrup's largest water meter contract to that date.

Company

Kamstrup traces its history to Olaf Kamstrup's workshop in Aarhus in 1946. The timeline records the introduction of ultrasound metering in 1991, electricity meters in 1998 and integrated wireless communications in 2002. Later milestones include the OMNIA platform and READy software, showing how the business expanded from instruments into collection and analysis.

The current legal contact information identifies Kamstrup A/S at Industrivej 28 in Skanderborg, Denmark. Its company overview describes work with utilities and building-performance managers. That combination of metrology, communications and operational software is more informative for buyers than treating the company as only a supplier of radio-enabled meters.

Ownership has been stable for more than three decades. The Danish encyclopedia Lex records that the energy cooperative OK a.m.b.a. took 50% of the share capital in 1987 and bought out the Kamstrup family in 1990, and gives 1,633 employees in 2024 and 1,513 in 2025. Kamstrup's 2024 results show revenue of DKK 3.0 billion, 17% lower than in 2023, and a profit before tax of DKK 247 million; Lex gives 2025 revenue of DKK 3,460 million. The same report describes a new American headquarters in Georgia with production and an R&D centre. The policies and certificates page lists ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001 and ISO/IEC 27001 certification, MID Module D approval and ISO 17025 accredited calibration laboratories in Denmark and the US, and the ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certificate issued by DNV dates the first certification to November 2005.