Water Monitoring Systems - Flow Meter IoT Sensors for Water Usage Telemetry

Do you, your teams, business, or your organization need to remotely monitor water resources or other fluids?

Water monitoring is easy and effective for managing and improving your operations. In this Instructable, you’ll see how to 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.

Flowmeters use various technologies to count pulses / ticks as fluids flow by the flow meter. In this Instructable, you’re seeing pictures with magnetic flowmeters and mechanical impellers / propellers.

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. So depending on your water monitoring deployments, you may prefer to use flow meters with mechanical propellers / impellers.

Tools.Valarm.net is an open platform so you can use sensors and hardware made by any manufacturer. By combining and integrating a variety of sensor brands you get the most effective solution. Our customers favorite water sensor manufacturers include Flowline, In-Situ, McCrometer, Senix, and Eno Scientific. Take a gander at the overview fluids and water monitoring systems page for more info.

Let’s talk about the nitty gritty of these flow meters and how you deploy your water monitoring systems.

The water monitoring unit you see in the photos has 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
• Morningstar solar charge controller connected to lead acid battery and solar panel

You can read the next steps for details on how install water monitoring systems for flow meter measurement. If you're more of a visual video learner, then you can also watch the Youtube video that we've included here.

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 power – ethernet sensor hub and Verizon 4G LTE router

You'll see in the photos that there's 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 you'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 can 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 on Tools.Valarm.net lets you analyze your water sensor information in the units you need, like acre-inches, liters, and gallons.

Need to view and manage your organization’s water resources on a web dashboard?

How about alerting when levels or flow goes to high or low?

Have a look at how flowmeters integrate with Water Monitoring Dashboards, which you and your teams can customize and view on any device with a web browser, like your phone or tablet.

Questions?

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

You saw how McCrometer flowmeters are cost-effectively monitored with Tools.Valarm.net. However, you're not limited to any specific sensor brands since Tools.Valarm.net is an open platform. That means you can use any sensor hardware manufacturer like Flowline, In-Situ, EKM Metering, Campbell Scientific, Vaisala, Senix, or Eno Scientific.

Your organization can combine these fluid and water monitoring systems with any additional Industrial IoT sensor monitoring needs you’ve got, like:

• Air Quality and Pollution Monitoring
• Telemetry for Tanks - Levels and Volumes of Fluids and Products for Chemical Resources Distribution
• Fleet Vehicles, Trucks, and Trailers with Industrial Equipment like Pumps, Vacuums, Hydraulics, Motors, Generators
• Web Dashboards

We understand customer needs for a variety of industries.

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.