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Water Scheme Telemetry System - 2016

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  • dan

    Hey Guys, after a couple of years of adding more sensors and sites to the water system, here's what it looks like now...

    I decided early on to change the layout of the system from a typical SCADA type block layout to an actual 3rd person overview with the map of the farm so that the owners of the property could understand it a whole lot easier.

    They now have alot of data points they can monitor:
    https://www.dropbox.com/s/sxcqj31hktnfjpt/Villamosa Overview 2016.PNG?dl=0

    The automation part of the system is performed in the background using a script, thanks to Joel and Phil for their assistance with the syntax to use.

    The property owners are over the moon with the system, the pumps only pump at night time unless absolutely necessary, this saves them 1/3rd of their power bill. They also save money in time and diesel to go out and manually check tanks and troughs.

    Cheers
    Dan

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  • M

    If you don't mind can you give a quick overview of what the whole system is intended to do for the farm(s)?

    Is this all water pumped from a water table? I see there's a house pump and a dam and a whole lot of orange lines among other colors!

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  • dan

    Hi there, the orange lines on the map are fence lines.
    Blue lines are main pump water lines, green are trough feed water lines. Pink lines are new recently installed lines and the top purple line is another new line installed even more recently.

    The Dam Pump pumps from a large dam on the property, you can see it in the bottom right surrounded by a fence line. It pumps up to the House Tank and feeds garden watering also. It can be switched to feed across to the driveway tank.

    The Bore Pump pumps from a bore up to either the solar tank at the top of the property, or the driveway tank, or manually to the west to a turkey nest. The solenoids automatically open / close before the pump starts, then the pump starts and fills the appropriate tank until it's fill point is reached.

    The Solar Pump draws from the solar tank and feeds a couple of tanks right at the top of the property. Although the solar pump is automatic also, it obviously can only pump during the day.

    The whole system feeds cattle troughs around the property via gravity feed from the appropriate tanks.

    Cheers
    Dan

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  • M

    It's making a whole lot more sense now.

    I notice that account is taken of peak and off peak electricity usage. I assume this system consumes a considerable amount of power?

    Is there much elevation change between the top tank / house tank? Also what kind of distances are we talking about here for the entire map?

    Did you design this whole system or are you just working to integrate the data acquisition/display?

    Mihai

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  • dan

    Hi
    It's not so much the amount of power it uses, but they have two rates, after hours it costs them 1/3rd of what it costs them during peak periods, so I made the system pump off peak the majority of the time working off the appropriate low level values next to each tank.

    There is probably a distance of around 5km as the crow flies between the dam and the top tank, however the terrain is up and down a bit so takes a fair while to drive all around.

    The farmer put the water system in, I assisted with the installation of the solar pump and I put all the control gear in.
    The main goal here was to reduce the amount of driving and labour time, then we discovered we could gather statistics from the system such as run times and such like which actually prove useful to the farmer.

    Cheers
    Dan

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  • M

    That's a lot of work to connect all that. I bet you've got a happy farmer on your hands.

    Thanks again Dan,

    Mihai

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