Does your organization need to remotely monitor water resources or other fluids?

Water monitoring with Tools.Valarm.net makes it easy and effective to improve your business operations.

In this write-up, you’ll see how our customers monitor water usage with Industrial Internet of Things / IoT sensors. You can monitor how much water is being used with a meter than measures flow, a.k.a. a flowmeter sensor. Our customers use flowmeters that use various technologies to count pulses / ticks as fluids flow by the meter.

For this story, you’re seeing pictures with a magnetic flowmeter. Our customers also use impeller / propeller based flowmeters like you see in this customer story.

Magnetic flowmeters don’t have any moving parts and require a battery to function. Some of our customers are reluctant to deploy flowmeters with batteries since the life spans are sometimes shorter than advertised.

Tools.Valarm.net is an open platform so you can use sensors and hardware made by any manufacturer. And combine and integrate a variety of brands to provide the most effective solution.

Our customers favorite water sensor manufacturers include Flowline, In-Situ, McCrometer, and Eno Scientific.

 

The water monitoring units you see in these photos have these key components:

  • PWM sensor adapter for counting pulses of the McCrometer water flow meter
  • Ethernet sensor hub connected to Verizon modem for sending sensor information to Tools.Valarm.net
  • Sierra Wireless ES450 router / gateway with Verizon 4G LTE SIM card
  • McCrometer Mc Mag3000 magnetic flowmeter
  • Solar charge controller (e.g., Morningstar) connected to lead acid battery and solar panel

At the top of each box is a Morningstar SunSaver-6 solar charge controller. The solar charge connects to:

  • Sealed lead acid battery you see in the bottom left
  • Solar panels outside your box that charge your batteries and keep your water monitoring system box alive to report sensor information to Tools.Valarm.net
  • Electronic components that need a load of power – ethernet sensor hub and Verizon 4G LTE router

You also see a cable that connects the McCrometer McMag 3000 flow meter to the PWM sensor adapter inside of the box. It’s a McCrometer pulse output cable we’ll use to read ticks / counts from the water flow meter. This one is set to output a pulse / tick every 10 gallons. Make sure you talk to your sensor manufacturer and know what yours is. And remember to use virtualhub to set your PWM output type to edgecount.

The pulse output cable for the McCrometer Mc Mag3000 has yellow and gray leads. Connect your yellow lead to the ground connector on your Yoctopuce PWM sensor adapter module. You can use either channel and connect another PWM sensor to your 2nd channel.

Attach your gray wire to the middle connector channel input with the PWM sensor input icon. You’ll need to use a wire to jump the PU / Pull Up channel and the PWM sensor input channel like you see in the photo.

Once you’ve got your PWM flowmeter pulses on Tools.Valarm.net, you can configure Totalizers to monitor total water usage. Totalizers keep track of a running total for each of your flowmeters.

You, your teams, and your organization use customized totalizers to know what’s going on in the field. You’ll know how much water is flowing right now so you can predict what will happen in the future.

Historical sensor information lets you analyze your water sensor information in the units you need, like acre-inches, liters, and gallons.

 

Questions?

You’ve learned in this article how customers use Tools.Valarm.net to remotely monitor flowmeters for water resources management.

We understand customer needs for various industries and the variety and flexibility needed to make your remote monitoring deployments successful in improving your organization’s operations in order to save you time and money. One example of how we do that is the fact that your Industrial IoT devices connect to Valarm Tools Cloud via any internet connectivity, like 3G/4G/5G GSM mobile cell networks, LTE, WiFi, Ethernet, LPWAN, or RPMA like Ingenu.

We’re ready to help you and your teams deploy your most effective remote monitoring solutions.

Please don’t hesitate to Contact Us at Info@Valarm.net if you’ve got any questions.