Hi, I work for a rural local government council in Australia and we are looking to pilot LoRa water quality sensors in our swimming pools. The local council I work for owns 7 pools which span over a large geographical space, so to be able to centrally monitor the water quality across these 7 pools would help us improve the delivery of the public pool service to our community.
Looking at available sensors on the market the Libelium Plug and Sense Smart Water or Smart Water Ions devices seem to be the only options that I can find. Unfortunately these sensors only capture a small snapshot of the data we need. I am looking for a sensor/s that can capture the following water attributes:
PH Levels
Chlorine
Alkalinity
Calcium hardness
CNA (Cyanuric Acid or isocyanuric acid)
Temperature
Does anyone have experience with using LoRa sensors to monitor swimming pool water quality or know of a device that can capture the above listed attributes.
Hi Russell,
do you really need to constantly monitor all these levels throughout the day and night (which is what the seniors offer)? As your public pools always have staff present, and presumably you already have chemical test kits, do you really just want access to the data when they test?
The calibration requirements for in water test equipment alone would be a pain, let alone the capital cost.
Just a few thoughts on your use case.
Phil in Perth, Australia
Our pools are in very small outlying towns where we have 1 life guard on duty. Currently when they do there manual tests they have to shut down access to the pool and ask everyone to exit whilst they are doing the tests, OH&S issues around not having the life guard 100% focused on making sure no one is drowning.
Also having pools that are 40 minutes drive away from our main township of Hamilton if we can proactively monitor the water quality we can be more proactive to fix or at the very least advise our community that the pool will not be opened today.
So in a perfect world to be able to use LoRa sensors to get this data at the very least the start / middle / end of day is what we are looking for.
Russell,
I spoke to a guy at our local council in Perth who organised the purchase of treatment equipment at a large public pool a couple of years ago He indicated they had looked into the fully automated results options from the new test units but the data provided did not meet the Australian Standard (I was not aware there even was one!) so they decided not to pursue that option.
It seems like your best bet, given the current market options, is a regular in-line test unit with a UART. Run that into your friendly microcontroller (e.g. Pycom’s LoPy) and publish the data packet via LoRa.
You may need a repeater station to get to your gateway in Hamilton (I am not sure of your local topography, are you in SA?).
I have done this sort of thing before but there is a bit of hacking involved unfortunately. This is what happens when you are sat on the bleeding edge of things!!
I have put out some more requests for information from others, if anything comes back I will let you know,
Phil
I am part of a research team at the SMART Infrastructure Facility (University of Wollongong). We design & build IoT solutions for interesting community-driven projects. We use LoRaWAN for many of our applications and are looking into water quality applications for an increasing number of projects here in the Illawarra, NSW.
Let me know if you are interested (http://digitallivinglab.uow.edu.au/contact/) & we can see what might be possible
Thanks @Hughf, I have posted on the digital living lab website. I was at the ASCA conference in Melbourne last week where members form your team presented. I look forward to hearing back from your team.
Hi Russell, apologies for not replying sooner, but I have just returned from leave & no-one has received your message. Could you please resend it direct to our project manager, Benoit at: benoitp@uow.edu.au.
HI @damiends, I have recently been advised of a company called EcoData (http://ecodata.net.au/) that do have LoRa sensors to manage pool water quality. I haven’t followed them up as yet however as we are currently pursuing a different approach.
Hi Russell,
Sam here from ICT International. We are working on a LoRaWAN system for swimming pools to monitor free chlorine, bromine and pH (all of which are required [or recommended] prior to pool opening and thence every four hours when there is a bather load. We should talk mid next week?
Cheers,
Sam
