Government regulations have mandated that public utilities provide ever increasing monitoring and reporting of their systems. Utility departments are learning that a good SCADA system can provide the backbone for remotely monitoring and controlling of their freshwater, wastewater, and collection systems.
Because utility systems are typically spread throughout a municipality, city, or county, radio telemetry is the most reliable and cost effective means to tie each of the remote locations back to the plant or administrative office through the same radio channel.
A major advantage of telemetry is eliminating the need for driving across town to check on, or change the status of equipment operating at remote locations.
Telemetry also allows the utility to monitor alarm conditions before they become critical. The utility can monitor high-well conditions and power outages occurring at remote sites in “real time”.
Another advantage of telemetry is preventive maintenance. By utilizing the reports and trending provided by the computer system, the utility can diagnose pump problems long before they become failures. These reports allow the user to compare run times of pumps from day to day.
SCADA telemetry is able to relay system status across to initiate automatic control functions. The system can transmit status such as “pump run”, “tank level”, “water pressure” or “wet well level” from one remote location to another to activate control functions.
Fortech utilizes several communication systems to achieve interconnectivities between local and remote sites in order to provide for a complete solution. These systems include:
Licensed Radio Systemx
Spread Spectrum Radio System
Fiber Optic Ethernet
10/100 Mbits CAT 5 Ethernet
T1 line
ISDN line