Choosing to live off grid means making the decision to be self-sufficient in energy. You may have a desire to live out in the wild, where there are no conventional power sources.

You may simply dislike shelling out to the energy companies, or you may be concerned about your impact on the earth.

The likelihood is that it’s probably a combination of all of these.

Making it work means being able to harness natural resources for your benefit. It also means being able to minimize your consumption to fit the supply from our natural resources.

The challenge is knowing when, for example, your water supply is dropping, sufficiently in advance for you to do something about it.

The Internet of Things, a.k.a, IoT, is a smart way of monitoring the things you need to use on a daily basis to live successfully off grid. The idea behind it is to use technology to help simplify your life.

What Can You Monitor?

Anything that’s important for your organization can be monitored. If you are aiming at self-sufficiency in energy, you are probably producing your own food too. Monitoring the soil temperature will help you know exactly when to plant your crops. If you have a large area to cover, you can do monitor it remotely through software which connects through the internet to any device with a web browser.

If you are concerned about optimizing your building’s temperature you may want to be able to monitor the weather outside. Using smart technology will give you real time information. And if your monitoring system is linked to your heating system, your building will effectively react to to the weather outside.

Every organization and household will have waste. Depending on what system you use, you may need to monitor capacity, where a smart system will help you to plan ahead.

Managing Water

The above examples are two ways that smart monitoring can help with living off grid. However, water is going to be the most important resource you will need to manage. Your water management and monitoring will take various forms. For example, it may be useful to constantly measure the quality (e.g., pH and ORP) as well as the levels of water (e.g., in water wells) available for you.

Using smart software known as ‘web dashboards’, water sensor data is automatically put on a private webpage so you can view it on any device with a web browser and receive email alerts.

Monitoring the amount of moisture in the soil can be useful because knowing the soil moisture status enables highly efficient irrigation, providing the water as and when required, and eliminating the wasteful use of water when irrigation is not needed.

Smart sensoring systems are the technological way to make living off grid successful. You can use smart technology to monitor any system you have, which helps you remain self-sufficient. This is critical since you want to make the best use of the natural resources around you.

Note: A grand thank you goes out to Jackie Edwards for volunteering to submit this article for the Tools.Valarm.net Industrial IoT blog. Thanks again Jackie!

Questions?

How do you, your teams, and your organization improve operations and effectiveness while saving your time and money?

Take a gander at our Customer Stories and Web Dashboards to learn more about how Tools.Valarm.net helps you, your teams, and your organization to improve operations and effectiveness – saving your money and your time with remote monitoring systems.

Whether you need to manage water resources, monitor water well levels and flow meters, piezometers, flood warning systems, or anything else, we’ll help you deploy your most effective monitoring solutions.

Since Tools.Valarm.net is an open software platform, your organization can integrate sensors made by various hardware manufacturers like Flowline, Senix, ClairAir, and Geokon.

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch at Info@Valarm.net and we’ll help you deploy your most effective monitoring systems.