Are you, your teams, or your organization monitoring water wells? If so then you’ve got options on what kind of water level sensors you want to use.

In this blog post you’ll learn how to use Tools.Valarm.net with Eno Scientific Water Well Watch sensors.

These Eno Scientific IoT water sensors are non-contact and use sonic technology. You’ll see photos in this story where the Eno Scientific Well Watch 660 Sonic Water Level Indicator is connected to Valarm Tools Cloud.

There’s also a long PVC pipe plastic pole that can be used for wind surfing… or in this case it’s used to test, verify, and emulate a water well depth of about 7 feet. In your deployment the sensors will be sending their sonic pulses down your water wells to measure water levels. However, this pipe is a lot more portable and easy to use for showing you how to wire everything up!

Need to use other level technologies like pressure transducers, piezometers / vibrating wires, or radar? Ready to improve your business operations with effective well water level monitoring systems?

Have a look at our Industrial IoT customer success stories using Industrial Internet of Things sensor devices to monitor water levels / depths with pressure transducers and vibrating wire piezometers.

Tools.Valarm.net is a flexible platform / Industrial IoT gateway, so you can use any combination of sensor technologies from any hardware manufacturers from around the world! For example, you can combine and integrate sensors made by Senix, Eno Scientific, McCrometer flow meters, In-Situ pressure transducers, Flowline radar sensors, and any other sensor companies like the ones you see deployed on our customer stories page.

In the photos you’ll see your standard issue Valarm setup with sensor components. You’ll see a sensor hub, RS-485 Modbus sensor adapter, 4-20mA sensor adapter, and a relay switch for turning industrial equipment on and off, like pumps, generators, fans, and motors. You can use any combination of sensors with Tools.Valarm.net like RS-232 sensor adapters with Geokon piezometers, but you’ll just need a couple key components to monitor water wells with Eno Scientific level sensor hardware.

Here are the key pieces from Shop.Valarm.net that you’ll need for each Eno Scientific Water Well Watch Sensors that you’re monitoring:

You can choose the power and internet connectivity that work best for your specific deployment scenario. Please don’t hesitate to Talk To Us at Info@Valarm.net if you’ve got any questions at any time!

We’re happy to help make sure you get your assets and environments monitored, whether it’s water, flood warning systems, or anything else.

To get started make sure you’ve got your Eno Scientific Water Well Watch sensor wired up correctly to your Yoctopuce RS-485 Modbus serial sensor adapter.

In this example we’re using blue, white-blue, and green wires to connect the water level sensors and RS-485 Modbus sensor adapters.

You can use whatever colors of wires you fancy. Just make sure you connect the 3 wires like this:

  • RS-485 A on the Eno Scientific goes to DATA + on the RS-485 sensor adapter (white-blue wire in the photos)
  • RS-485 B on the Well Watch Water Level Indicator connects to DATA – on the RS-485 Modbus sensor (blue wire in the photo examples)
  • Ground on the Eno Scientific sensors go to Ground on the Yoctopuce RS-485 serial sensor adapters (green wire in the pictures)

Make sure you’ve got the EN. TERMINATION switch turned on on your Yoctopuce RS-485 Modbus sensor if this is the only thing on the bus like it is here.

Double check that you’ve got the latest firmware versions on your Yoctopuce Internet of Things sensor devices.

The rest of the set up will be done after you’ve followed these initial steps and used virtualhub software to link your sensor hubs to Tools.Valarm.net.

Now let’s set up your RS-485 Modbus sensor adapters to talk to Eno Scientific water well watch sensors.

Click Configure on your Yoctopuce RS-485 in virtualhub. You’ll get a configure screen that looks kind of like the screenshot you see here.

Be sure you’ve set your Eno Scientific hardware to use MODBUS RTU mode. And make sure your baud rate and encoding match.

In this case we’ve set the baud rate to 19200 with 8N1 parity and stop bit info.

Once you’re sure these settings match between the Eno Scientific sensor and your Yoctopuce RS-485 Modbus sensor adapter, then you’re ready to set up a job file script that automatically handles communication once it’s been configured.

Click the manage job files button towards the bottom of the configure screen.

You’ll see it’s got a little blue highlight in the screenshot.

Define a new job file.

We’ve called ours EnoWell660.job since this IoT sensor example application uses an Eno Scientific Well Watch 660DL Sonic Water Level Indicator.

Click the edit button under Action.

You’ll see the edit button has a blue highlight around it.

After you click that we’ll set up a task for measuring water well level sensor data.

Add a new task to your .job file and edit it. We’ve called ours measure Water Well but you’re free to get creative and call it what you will!

In your new task configure a Periodic task.

Select Read from MODBUS device

For the MODBUS command choose Read holding register.

Check what your MODBUS slave address is on your Eno Scientific Water Well Watch sensor.

In this case our MODBUS sensor slave address was 11.

Set your Holding Register Number.

You’ll find the list of address space Registers in your Eno Scientific 660 Manual.

The address space register 101 returns instantaneous water well depths as 32 bit words as floating point representation.

Select 32bit float for the Encoding. Map the value to sensor genericSensor1.

Set a repeat interval for how often you want to get a new water well level measurement.

If your water well levels aren’t changing so fast then you can set this to 15 minutes or as often as you’d like.

Last step click the Use custom protocol radio button to change 1 last setting due to the endian word ordering of the Eno Scientific sensors. (more on big and little endian here)

Click edit on the expect command and make sure you’ve changed it to FLOAT32X, Not FLOAT32B.

It’ll look like the screenshot you see here.

Now you’re all set up and ready to receive your water well sensor data at Tools.Valarm.net.

Once you’ve logged in to Tools.Valarm.net map your RS-485 sensor’s genericSensor1 to the column / field you’d like to use, e.g., User1.

You can also set up custom column names like you see in the Device Manager screenshot.

You’ll see the instantaneous water well depths are being reported as just under 7 feet.

Which is perfect since that’s the length of our test water well a.k.a. wind surfing pole!

Now that your Eno Scientific Well Watch sensors are integrated with Tools.Valarm.net, you can graph, download, map (in 2D & 3D!), alert (via SMS or e-mail), or forward your data using our APIs to business analytics and intelligence systems like the Esri ArcGIS platform.

Click your water well on any of the 2D or 3D maps to get the latest water level information. Remote monitoring made easy and cost-effective. On the 3D earth globe maps, the height and color of each water well is based on the latest measurement reported by the Eno Scientific Water Well Watch sensors.

If you need to monitor your flowmeters and water usage levels, we can help with that too. Have a look at this customer story with a web dashboard showing water well levels as well as flowmeter rates for effective water resources management.

 

Note: If you need to get more of the sensor measurement values from each reading from your Eno Scientific Water Well Watch sensors you can get additional measurements like:

  • Water in Well
  • Eno Scientific Sensor Battery Voltage
  • Water Well Probe Temperature

All you’ll need to do is build on top of the initial example above that measures 1 sensor value – the instantaneous water well depth.

You can edit your writeModbus command to return more bytes of address space registers to the Modbus sensor adapter.

Here is a recommended write ModBus command that we used in the example screenshots:

0B030064001C

And to read the 7 sensor values like temperature and voltage we used expect:

:0B0338($1:FLOAT32X)($2:FLOAT32X)0*($3:FLOAT32X)($4:FLOAT32X)($5:FLOAT32X)0*($6:FLOAT32X)($7:FLOAT32X).*

Then on Tools.Valarm.net you can map your RS-485 generic Sensor fields to User 1 – 7 fields like you see in the screenshots.

And you can use the column renaming feature to show just what you want, like Instantaneous Water Well Depth, Sensor Battery Voltage, Water in Well (like gallons or liters), and Water Well Probe Temperature.

Now you’ve got all the sensor information from your Eno Scientific Well Watch Water Level Indicators!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Questions?

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me at Info@Valarm.net.

We’re happy to help you with your remote monitoring needs. Whether you need to monitor water, flooding levels, wells, grasshoppers, or anything else.