Each site includes sedimentation dams and leachate pump out-tanks. These require regular monitoring of both water level and water quality to ensure they don’t pass over the spillway and into surrounding waterways during significant rainfall events. Such an ooccurrence would be of significant risk to the local environment.
The Council sought to implement remote monitoring and control technology to assist with their compliance obligations when it came to these site dams and leachate pump-out tanks.
By doing so, this would provide certainty around water levels and water quality on site, allowing for an effective and quicker response should any events occur. This would also see an increase in accuracy for both real-time as well as historic reporting.
The Council was also seeking to install a weather station at the waste facility so that a more accurate correlation could be drawn between rainfall and dam / leachate water levels. In addition to this, having a localised weather station that measures wind speed / direction would assist Council when investigating nuisance complaints relating to dust, odour etc.
Multiple Monitoring Points
In addition to the weather parameters, sensors were deployed at various locations across the site to monitor or control the following:
- level - continuous monitoring of the tanks and the sedimentation dam, including multiple SMS/Email alarms at various spillway heights
- water Quality - pH, EC, Turbidity and DO
- automate - the open/shut position of the leachate pumps
Multi-point Telemetry Solution
With those monitoring points scattered across the facilities, Pacific Data Systems supplied the Council with a multi-point, combined radio and 3G telemetry system.
Each sensor deployed in the field was connected to an Olemtech radio transmitter, with each of these transmitting back to a central dataTaker ‘M Series’ logger. The logger included an integrated 3G modem for remote web portal access allowing for improved response times and minimisation of data transposition errors.
Post-install Benefits
- improved compliance obligations
- improved response times due to alarm functionality
- minimisation of data transposition errors due to remote telemetry
- web portal access for full visibility at all times
