In this write-up you’ll see how our customers use Tools.Valarm.net for near real-time monitoring of water usage.
With your Totalizer features and functionality, Tools.Valarm.net keeps track of water flow measurements and how much water gets used by you, your clients, or your organization.
For effective water well management, or managing any flow meters, you’ll want to integrate these total usage calculations, as well as water level depths, into your water monitoring systems.
Update: Are you a visual video learner? You can also watch this step-by-step HowTo video tutorial to learn how to integrate Totalizers for Flow Meters and Water Flow Measurement Totals with IoT Sensors.
Let’s get started with how to configure your Totalizers on Tools.Valarm.net so you can automatically keep running totals of water usage measurements from your flow meters.
For these water monitoring examples, we’re using a few key ingredients to monitor water flow meters:
- PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) sensor adapters that count spins or ticks from water flow meters like the McCrometer EA618-02 meters, Mc Mag 3000 magnetic water meters, Seametrics flow meters, EKM flow meters, and other pulse-based flow measurement sensors like dry reeds and hall effect meters
- Ethernet IoT sensor hubs connected to long-range WiFi antennas, like TP-LINK CPE210’s and those made by Mikrotik and Ubiquiti networks
In this story you’re seeing a photo with specifics about what Valarm water monitoring deployment looks like. Note that this water is being drawn from a deep water well where a PWM sensor adapter is monitoring water flow in the pipe. And at the same time a 4-20mA pressure transducer is monitoring water levels in the water well. All of this Industrial IoT sensor information is used to inform you whether or not your water pump is in safe operating conditions with safety alerts.
There’s a propeller or impeller in the blue pipe that spins as water flows through the pipe. The PWM sensor adapter in “edgecount” mode counts 2 ticks for each propeller spin, which we can use with Tools.Valarm.net to calculate water usage and flow rates.
Here’s what the data looks like when viewing the remote Valarm unit in the Device Manager on Tools.Valarm.net. Note the PWM 1 column is the count coming from the PWM sensor connected to the McCrometer water flow unit seen in the picture above.
There is also a 4-20mA sensor adapter connected to an In-Situ pressure transducer for monitoring water levels. Tools.Valarm.net is an open platform so you can use water, air quality, and any sensors from any hardware manufacturer like Senix, Geokon, Flowline, Seametrics, or Eno Scientific.
Note that the Yocto PWM counts up to 1 million then restarts counting from 1, which is why we need the totalizers seen in the Calc 1 and Calc 2 columns.
You can configure your totalizers by clicking on the Totalizers button under Configure Data Path in your Device Manager on Tools.Valarm.net. Now let’s talk more on the options you have for setting up and configuring your flow meter totalizers.
After you click the Configure Totalizers button you’ll see this window to Configure Totalizing Calculators. If you need to start your count value at a specific number you can click the orange edit button at the top to change it.
There are 4 totalizers available and you can switch between them using the tabs at the top of the window. In this example we’re configuring the 1st one and storing the values in the Calc 1 column in the device details view on Valarm Tools Cloud. Check the box to Enable the totalizer and give it a name and notes that apply to your scenario.
Here we’ll keep track of all the raw data from the PWM channel 1 and output it into the Calc 1 field.
You can also set a pre-divisor to divide all of the values by a certain number (e.g., by 2 as we do in the next example) and a post-scaler to convert the ticks to your liquid measuring unit of choice, e.g., gallons, liters, acre inches, or inch-acres.
Your scaler will depend on your water flow meter sensor manufacturer, pipe size, and what units you want your results.
You’ll customize all of this here on this screen in Tools.Valarm.net.
Here’s the configuration for another Totalizer where we’re using the same PWM channel 1 and outputting into the Calc 2 field.
There’s a pre-divisor of 2 set here since the Yocto-PWM in edgecount mode counts 2 ticks for each propeller spin of the McCrometer EA618-02.
Now that we’ve divided by 2 we can multiply these “pulses” by the manufacturer’s specifications, e.g., 3.846 for a 10″ pipe, to get gallons.
You can rename your fields and use custom nicknames by following this HowTo tutorial guide for IoT sensor aliases.
Remember that you can now utilize your water flow sensor data and totalizer calculations with all of your Valarm Tools Cloud features.
For example, you can integrate your new flow measurement totalizers for mapping, graphing, charting, IoT sensor data exporting, and forwarding real-time sensor data to your endpoints via our APIs.
Here are some of our customers that are currently using this water flow meter totalizer software you saw above:
- Nebraska’s North Platte Natural Resources District (NPNRD) – part 1 & part 2
- Dudek Environmental Consulting and Water Resources Management in California and the Western USA
- Production Water Well Management in California
Have a gander at our our fluid and water monitoring solutions page for more on monitoring all sorts of liquids, like water level monitoring, tank monitoring, and flood warning systems.
Please don’t hesitate to contact us at Info@Valarm.net if you’ve got any questions.