Mount Lofty Botanic Garden – telemetry system

Client: Department for the Environment and Heritage
Location: South Australia
Date: May 2010 – Ongoing

Designing a simple, innovative telemetry system for water storage tanks; saving water while reducing manual processes and increasing safety.

Background

The Mount Lofty Botanic Garden, covering 100 hectares of plantings on the slopes of Mt Lofty near Adelaide, South Australia, managed the levels of three water storage tanks using an old hardwired control system. Over the years the reliability of the system had become a concern as cables were damaged and difficult to repair.

Solution

Entura was engaged to design and install a new system to control the pumps and maintain correct operating levels of each water tank using radios. The system was designed for ease of use and simplicity, comprising pressure transducers to measure water level, radios to communicate with the logger/controller and software as an interface to the system.

The network is made up of a base site (control and operator interface), three remote water tanks and two remote pump sites. The levels of each tank are sent to the control hub by radio. The controller determines whether tanks require filling. If a tank is empty, remote pumps are turned on until the desired level is reached.

Numerous alarm states are monitored too, such as tanks overflowing, or pumps failing to turn on or off. If a fault occurs, an operator is notified via SMS and can access the site remotely via smartphone to acknowledge faults or switch to manual override.

Outcome

The telemetry system designed by Entura has resulted in large water savings as the client now has real-time monitoring of the tank levels. It has also reduced labour and safety risks as the tanks no longer need to be manually checked.

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