Water Monitoring Costs Halved – Case Study
The city of Hudson, Ohio had a distribution system with two large water tanks that required constant monitoring. The tanks communicated with the main water treatment plant through leased telephone lines. At the plant, the tank levels were fed into a chart recorder that was also responsible for controlling the city’s pumps. Over time, the leased lines aged considerably and the monthly cost and difficulty of servicing the lines and equipment began to outweigh the benefits. The plant was only manned eight hours a day and notifications for critical conditions outside these hours were limited. The city had an existing SCADA system for monitoring their in-plant information and wanted to integrate it with the information from the distribution system.
The city contacted a Data-Command sales representative in order to find the right solution. Soon after, the Data-Command certified partner installed Data-Command compliant products, utilizing cellular technology at the tank sites. The information from the tanks was sent to Data-Command’s data centers and the web interface was configured to display city information and notify employees of pertinent events. Through Data-Command’s transport technology, the tank information was sent to another Data-Command compliant product connected to the water plant’s chart recorder and the Data-Command OPC SCADA interface software operated on the plant’s SCADA computer.
The elimination of the old leased lines immediately cut the city’s monitoring costs in half, allowing them to monitor their distribution system and receive critical alerts all day, every day. The Data-Command OPC SCADA interface software allowed the client’s existing SCADA system to display and log information, eliminating the need for the operator to go to multiple places to view information.
