On a recent trip to Pennsylvania we worked with an upstream oil & gas company to deploy noise / sound monitoring units around a natural gas compressor station. On the same trip to work with Seneca Resources we rapidly deployed additional pond water level monitoring systems, making even more effective water resources management on top of the existing water monitoring stations. This time it was a lot warmer since there was no arctic polar ice blast!
You can see in the picture above the conduit running from the Valarm monitoring box to the impoundment water pond. Inside the conduit is a water level / pressure transducer sensor – the Flowline LD31 you see in the photo on the right. This sensor uses the 4-20mA sensor standard so it’s sensor readings are easily readable by using hardware compatible with Tools.Valarm.net.
The water level sensor is placed at the bottom of the water body and reports the height of the water above it. Then you can use a WiFi, mobile cellular data connection, or any other type of internet connectivity to get your real-time, cloud-based sensor information. That’s it! Rapidly deployable and easy to use remote monitoring systems.
Here are the key components you need for your remote water monitoring systems:
- Ethernet sensor hubs (connected via ethernet cable to your wireless modem or antenna, or use WiFi or GSM mobile cell networks)
- 4-20mA compatible water sensors, e.g., Flowline or In-Situ
- 4-20mA sensor adapters
Plugging the water sensor into the Valarm monitoring solution
In order to keep these Valarm remote monitoring units running, these components are in a weatherproof box with a solar charge controller (e.g., Sunsaver-10L with LVD) that’s connected to a solar panel and a lead acid battery.
This deployment took well under an hour. We were really grateful for this since it started to rain really hard right as we got back in the trucks! By that time the remote sensor data was already available in real-time via any web browser at Tools.Valarm.net so we watched the water levels rising from the convenience of our iPhones and Androids in the vehicles.
Graph of water levels rising over time from Valarm Tools Cloud
Using handy Linear Scalers we convert the raw sensor range of 4-20mA to the real world range of 0-34 feet and can use that calculated value for all applications like mapping, graphing, analysis, and APIs. See this how to step-by-step tutorial for more on setting up linear scalers on Valarm Tools Cloud.
Using Valarm’s JSON API, the GIS team at Seneca integrates Valarm environmental sensor data with the Esri ArcGIS platform. This improves overall operations and effectiveness since they know more about the current states of their widely distributed assets. It also provides power analysis and modeling capabilities in addition to alerting and executive dashboards.
Finishing up solar panel and battery installation to keep the Valarm monitoring station powered up and self-contained.
Valarm monitoring box wired up and monitoring pond water levels – ready to shut the door and walk away!
Remote water monitoring has been our biggest market thus far even though with Valarm you can literally monitor anything, anywhere! Next up we’ll be monitoring water quality in streams – pH, conductivity, specific gravity, total dissolved solids (TDS), salinity.
Tools.Valarm.net is remotely monitoring critical factors in various industries, like:
Water resources management- Chemical distribution
- Remote environmental monitoring
- Bridge expansion joints
- Fluids / liquids
- Hydraulics power
- Flood monitoring systems, levels alerts, and early warnings
- Air quality and pollution
- Fleet vehicles, trucks, and trailers loaded up with industrial equipment and machinery, like pumps, generators, motors, and tanks
Take a gander at our Customer Stories page and Web Dashboards to see how we’re helping organizations like yours to run safer and more effectively while saving time and money.
Questions?
Please don’t hesitate to contact us at Info@Valarm.net if you’ve got any questions.
