The Environmental Monitoring Blog

Regional councils are becoming ever stricter when it comes to compliance, recording and reporting for water take consent holders.  It is common for consents to require daily submission of data electronically.  This means a quality datalogger and a quality telemetry system is required.  For the average user, setting up all that is required to achieve this can be a major headache.

Leaving aside the flow meter equipment (we don’t supply or install them, so it isn’t up to us to comment), how do you know if the datalogger and telemetry solution you have chosen is going to meet your requirements long term?  Firstly, I would separate the question into two parts – the datalogger and the telemetry requirements.

Make sure the datalogger is a proven model.  Cheaper is definitely not going to be better in this case!  You want to make sure the datalogger is flexible enough to handle multiple inputs, and has the capacity to store large amounts of data in the unlikely event that your telemetry system fails for a period of time (maybe as a result of a mobile phone provider problem).  If you aren’t sure, maybe contact someone in the environmental monitoring team at your regional council.  They will have experience with a range of dataloggers.

For the telemetry requirements, check first of all that your provider will be able to get the data from the datalogger and to the council in the format they require, and as frequently as they require it.  They may also be able to offer you a service where you can view your data on the Internet.  The data will probably be transmitted from the logger over one of the mobile networks, so data charges are going to be important (this will be one of the few ongoing costs).  The total amount of data is relatively small, so check that you aren’t being charged for a standard Internet data package (500MB or more) as this is way too much.

Lastly, You should also check whether your telemetry provider will notice if your datalogger goes offline or there are any problems.  If data is being submitted daily, they should check daily that it has been submitted.  Your regional council won’t be happy if it takes a week or two of no data before anyone does anything about it.

- Malcolm Barr