Watering the golf course in Southern California – now monitored by Valarm
Water monitoring in California? You need to monitor groundwater volume and groundwater availability? Yep, Valarm does that!
You’ll learn in this blog post how you can easily and rapidly deploy our cost-effective water sensor monitoring solutions. This summer we worked with Dudek to deploy Valarm water well monitoring systems (water well levels and water usage / flow) near a San Diego county golf course in sunny Southern California. It was a hot day for Lorenzo, Pawel, and Edward – plenty of sunblock and fluids were needed to avoid heatstroke!
The first step was to set up a long-range WiFi access point at the golf course. Then line of sight internet access was available for miles around, most importantly at each of the water well monitoring locations equipped with the following key components:
- Ethernet sensor hubs compatible with Tools.Valarm.net
- 4-20mA sensor adapters
- PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) sensor adapters
- In-Situ Level Troll water level sensors / pressure transducers
- McCrometer EA618 water flow / usage sensors
Installing the WiFi base station at the golf course – a Ubiquiti Rocket M2
Plugging in the ethernet cable connected to 1) the WiFi access point / antenna on the roof of the building and 2) the standard ethernet switch / hub for the office and golf course
Happy to have the long-range WiFi hot spot up – now it’s time to deploy Valarm water monitoring units at water wells and water pumps all around the desert valley!
We put TP-Link CPE210 antennas on each of the desert shacks to get internet access from our base station (Ubiquiti Rocket M2) located miles away back at the golf course. Then we can easily upload the real-time water sensor data to the Valarm Tools Cloud – tools.valarm.net.
Inside the Valarm water monitoring boxes – Yoctopuce ethernet sensor hubs with 4-20mA and PWM sensor adapters to get water usage / flow and water depth readings from the In-Situ and McCrometer sensors. Internet comes into the box via ethernet from the TP-Link antenna seen in the photo above.
Valarm water monitoring boxes are connected to the water pipes – measuring water flow / usage and water depth in the well via a pressure transducer. All of this remote telemetry / sensor data gets sent at regular intervals to Tools.Valarm.net. This saves everyone time and money by reducing the need for long, lonely drives to each site to take manual readings – now the water sensor readings are automatic and easily accessed from anywhere with an internet connection!
Tools.Valarm.net shows you a water level / depth graph from 1 of these monitoring boxes deployed in Southern California.
Tools.Valarm.net shows you a water usage / flow graph from 1 of these monitoring boxes deployed in Southern California in the Anza-Borrego Desert.
Below is a detailed picture with labels for each of the components used in this deployment so you have an idea how easy it is to set up your Valarm monitoring units to monitor anything, anywhere with Tools.Valarm.net .
Note that you can also use Tools.Valarm.net APIs (e.g., JSON) to get all of your real-time sensor data to any endpoints you’d like. And you can use sensors made by any manufacturer like Flowline or Eno Scientific.
Please don’t hesitate to contact us at Info@Valarm.net if you’ve got any questions.
