Monitoring Flow Meters and Managing Water Usage

You have quite an amazing quantity of water monitoring technologies available today.

Like what?

Let’s talk about effectively monitoring flow meters and water resources management.

Most industrial strength flow meters have various sensor output options.

Whether you’ve already installed, or will be installing flowmeters, made by McCrometer, EKM, Siemens, Foxboro Schneider Electric, Emerson, GE, Seametrics, or any other sensor hardware manufacturer, you’ll see that there are various output options like:

• Pulse Width Modulation (PWM)
• 4–20 mA
• RS-232
• RS-485 Modbus

In my experiences, PWM is the easiest sensor technology to work with for remotely monitoring flow meters.

Why? Because PWM sensor adapters easily measure and count pulses output by flow meters. Just like you and me, each flow meter is different. Flow meters output a pulse based on how much water (or other fluids) has flowed through the flow meter.

PWM sensor adapter measuring pulses output by a flow meter

Each pulse, a.k.a. count or tick, of your flow meters means a specific quantity has flowed by. For example, each pulse might mean half a gallon has flowed through your pipes. Depending on your sensor hardware manufacturer and customizability, the meaning of each pulse can vary widely. Fortunately, the factor to use for converting pulses from your flow meter to real world values, is included with your manuals, documentation, and can even be dug up by your flow meter company with the serial number.

When you’re counting pulses output by your flow meters, it’s quite simple to measure total usage for remote monitoring on the Industrial IoT cloud or your own custom website dashboard.

For example, a totalizer can be configured to automatically keep track of a running total of how much flow has occurred. For example, if your flow meter outputs a pulse for each 0.5 gallons of flow, and your flow meter has output 200 pulses, then you’ll see the real world value you care about — 100 gallons.

Now how do you wire up and connect your flow meters to PWM sensor adapters and a monitoring web site?

PWM sensor adapters have inputs that you’ll need to connect and wire up to your flow meters.

One example is seen in the diagram attached here. This wire attachment scenario is common for flow meters made by McCrometer, EKM, and Seametrics.

Depending on what make and model of flow meter you’re using, you may or may not need to use the Pull-Up to supply voltage to the wire.

Note that in various industrial use cases, like water well management, you may also need to monitor water levels and well depths.

You can do this by adding additional level sensors to your Industrial IoT sensor deployments.

For example, the 4–20 mA In-Situ level troll sensors installed for the water well monitoring systems you see in the photos.

Once your flow meters and other sensors are installed in the field, they can be powered by any power source, like 110V mains power or solar panels.

That’s your quick + easy general overview of monitoring flow meters for water, gas, or any other fluids.

Now you, your teams, and your organization can use web-based IoT monitoring systems and software to:

1. Save Your Time
2. Save Your Money
3. Improve Business Operations
4. Increase Effectiveness

Questions?

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me at Edward@Valarm.net if you’ve got any questions about monitoring flow meters, managing water wells, flood warning systems, noise / air / environmental monitoring, or measuring any other Industrial IoT sensors.