Water monitoring is critical for various industries. From water wells and lakes, to flood warning systems and other hydro services, organizations effectively monitor water with today’s IoT and sensor technologies.

In this customer story, you’ll see how our customers monitor water usage with ultrasonic flow measurement meters. These ultrasonic flow meters are special because you can attach them to the outside of the pipes you’re monitoring. This is nice for smaller pipes and other applications based on how your water systems are deployed in the field. Note that our customers also use magnetic flow meters like these from Seametrics and McCrometer.

And some of our customers prefer the mechanical flow meters with impeller propellers, which are tried and true without any of the super fancy technology that requires batteries or additional power. The bottom line is that Tools.Valarm.net monitors whichever kind of flow meters you prefer to use.

You can follow the links above and take a gander at our customer stories to learn more about the other types of flow meters. For now, in this story, let’s talk about UltraSonic (US) flow meters.

In order to measure these ultrasonic flow meters with Tools.Valarm.net, you’ll need a few components from Yoctopuce.com. Here are key components you’ll need for each of your water monitoring systems:

  • Sensor Hub Connector Devices – WiFi, ethernet, GSM, or other internet connectivity
  • RS-485 Modbus sensor adapters – communicates with your flow meters for measuring water usage
  • Ultrasonic Flow Meters and Transducers (TUF-2000 Series) – these connect to your pipes and sensor adapters
  • Micro Weather Station Meteo Sensors (Optional) – measures ambient temperature, relative humidity, and barometric pressure

How do you configure your RS-485 Modbus sensor adapters with these flow meters? Have a look at this water monitoring story where we go into the nitty gritty details on how to set up your RS-485 Modbus communication channels with your TUF-2000 series ultrasonic flow meters.

These water monitoring systems you see in the photos are integrated with water treatment facilities to help them run more efficiently. Smart water monitoring is critical for industrial and commercial applications like:

Specifically, water monitoring systems are important since they help you, your teams, and your organization with:

  • Saving Water
  • Environmental Regulation Compliance
  • Water Treatment Management
  • Longer Lifetimes for Your Equipment

When these monitoring systems are connected to Tools.Valarm.net, our customers can remotely monitor their water measurement systems. This includes the use of dashboards, graphs, maps, alerts, charting, and other analytical tools for business intelligence.

Note: A huge thank you goes out to Patrick at Hydroserve for sending the photos used in this story.

Lessons Learned:

  • When querying RS-485 Modbus registers, remember to pay close attention to the units of the variable you’re querying. For example, you may be measuring cubic meters of water or other fluids from the flow meter and you’ll want to convert it to gallons. Luckily you can use a quick multiplication calculator to convert to the water units you need.
  • There are multiple ways to arrange your ultrasonic flow meter transducers on your pipes, like the V method and Z method. We found the V method to be easiest to configure and set up. Your experiences may vary and you can read up and find plenty of documentation and videos about these flow meters around the web.
  • The slick clear plastic lid tops used on these boxes let you quickly and easily see what’s going on inside the boxes. Especially since the flow meters have a digital output screen, which you can read to make sure everything is working how you want it.

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at Info@Valarm.net if you’ve got any questions about monitoring water or anything else that you, your teams, and your organization need to monitor.