What happens when Your levee breaks?

Remotely monitoring water near rivers and levees is critical for the safety of your community or any other area.

How do Industrial IoT sensors make telemetry easy, cost-effective, and rapidly deployable?

You’ll learn in this customer story how Tools.Valarm.net software is used to remotely monitor Geokon piezometers / vibrating wires.

You’re seeing photos of Lorenzo and Edward out in the field, getting their boots dirty to make sure the customers remote monitoring needs are satisfied.

Piezometers measure liquid pressure for geotechnical engineering. If you’re not already a piezometer / vibrating wire (VW) expert, you can learn more about piezometers, transducers and pressure gauges here.

These remote monitoring deployments are part of a California government project that integrates Valarm Tools Industrial IoT software, combined with the expertise of other agencies and organizations like Wood Rodgers environmental engineering consultants, Jensen Drilling Company, HDRTeichert Construction Company, and the California Department of Water Resources (DWR).

You’re seeing photos of how we put the Industrial in Industrial IoT, with each of these remote monitoring systems that contain key hardware components like:

  • Geokon 4500S piezometers installed many feet down below our earth in a custom drilled hole
  • Geokon dataloggers (LC-2 and LC-2×4) connected to RS-232 serial sensor adapters
  • Yoctopuce sensors hubs that use Ting GSM cell networks to upload Industrial IoT sensor measurements to Tools.Valarm.net
  • RS-232 sensor adapters
  • Deep cycle, sealed lead acid (SLA) marine batteries monitored by Industrial IoT voltage sensors

These remote monitoring systems are deployed near levees and the Feather River in central California, north of Sacramento. Note that our customers have also used similar Industrial IoT monitoring systems with piezometers / vibrating wires to evaluate bridge joints and monitor bridge expansions for community safety, early warnings, and prevention of hazardous conditions.

The piezometer sensors are measured as often as needed by the client, e.g., once an hour at the top of the hour, and the monitoring systems go into a deep sleep mode to save battery between vibrating wire sensor measurements.

The systems have various amounts of piezometers deployed at each location, you can monitor as many sensors as you need with Tools.Valarm.net.

Vibrating wires / VW sensor readings are uploaded to Valarm Tools Cloud for analysis and visualization in data tables, on maps, 3D earth globes, graphs, historizers, web dashboards.

We’ll help you use our APIs like JSON to integrate your remote monitoring information with anything else you need, like business analytics and intelligence systems.

This piezometer / vibrating wire sensor telemetry deployment went really smoothly due to the expertise of the various organizations listed above. Big thanks to everyone involved to make it a success, especially Casey and Dustin at Jensen Drilling Company.


Lessons learned:

  • Designing custom pieces with our Makergear 3D printer is super handy and a quick and easy way to make parts like the piece that holds the dehumidifiers onto the lids of the BUD Industries boxes / enclosures so that the Geokon piezometer datalogger boxes (LC-2 and LC-2×4) stay nice and dry.
  • Unistrut is super useful for many situations. In these levee and water monitoring deployments along the Feather River, Lorenzo used unistrut to make custom fit battery holding platforms. Unistrut is quite helpful and flexible in a variety of scenarios and certainly came to the rescue here as an industrial strength solution.
  • The stainless steel boxes made by APX enclosures are solid and amazingly well built. It can take some time to drill additional holes in them, so we were patient with our drill bits and found that using cone step drill bits worked for making the holes in the stainless steel boxes, where you see the Laird Tech ground plane external GSM cell network antennas were installed on top of the boxes.


Questions?

Do you, your teams, and your organization need industrial monitoring systems for remotely tracking your valuable assets?

Take a gander at our Customer Stories Page, as well as our Web Dashboards to see how Tools.Valarm.net helps you save time and money with remote monitoring systems.

We’re here and ready to help you deploy your most effective remote monitoring systems, whether you’re monitoring water, levees, bridges, floods, groundwater levels, flow meters, aquifers, tank levels, wells, or anything else.

Please don’t hesitate to Contact Us at Info@Valarm.net.