Sydney Water deployed over 100 Grundfos Telemetry Units with tipping bucket rain gauges to capture reliable rainfall data. The early flood warnings and catchment modelling this has enabled reduces the risk of environmental damage and associated costs.
Sydney Water
Australia’s largest water utility, Sydney Water provides water, wastewater, recycled water and some stormwater services to Greater Sydney.
The situation
Sydney Water provides water, wastewater, recycled water and some stormwater services to more than 5 million people in Greater Metropolitan Sydney, the Illawarra and the Blue Mountains regions of New South Wales. It supplies over 1.4 billion litres of drinking water to homes and businesses daily.
Early detection of potential floods due to excessive rainfall is of key importance to reduce the risk of environmental damage and the associated costs. Recognising the importance of reliable monitoring of rainfall data to achieve this, the water utility needed to power a network of over 100 tipping bucket rain gauges.
The solution
The Grundfos remote rain gauge monitoring solution monitors rainfall data at various points in the network. A Grundfos Telemetry IoT/4G unit collects the data at each location.
In 2015, 100 remote telemetry units (RTUs) coupled with tipping bucket rain gauges were supplied to Sydney Water. The measured rainfall values are sampled and stored with time stamps at periodic intervals of 15 minutes, with the data being communicated directly to the SWC IICATS SCADA system using 3G and the DNP3 protocol.
In addition, a specific rain-gauging RTU configuration was developed to allow field operators to activate a ‘Calibration Mode’ for the SCADA system. This detects when the rain gauge is offline being calibrated, rather than online and actively gauging rainfall, ensuring false alarms for heavy rainfall were not activated during important routine calibration exercises.
Grundfos Telemetry IoT/4G is a self-contained datalogger / remote telemetry unit with:
- Internal battery pack
- IP68 unit enclosure
- Either an IoT (NB-IoT/ CaT-M1) or 4G (with 3G/2G fallback) modem
- Auto-switching internal and external antenna options
- Software configurable AI, CI, DI, Modbus and SDI-12 communication options
- Integrated submersion sensor
- Local diagnostic points
- Intelligent alarm reporting
It communicates with the Grundfos Connect Sensor Platform, DNP3/ WITS DNP3 Masters, or FTPS servers.
Key benefits
Grundfos supplied:
- Grundfos Telemetry 4G/IoT units with tipping bucket rain gauges
Facts:
- Topic: Rain gauge monitoring
- Location: Sydney, Australia
- Customer: Sydney Water
The outcome
The remote rain gauge monitoring solution has enabled the collection of vital rainfall data to use for catchment resource modelling and early flood warning systems.
Since its implementation, more reliable and effective monitoring of rainfall data has enabled Sydney Water to respond to flood warnings more quickly and effectively, reducing the risk of environmental damage and associated costs.
This project was originally implemented by Metasphere, a company acquired by Grundfos in 2023. The full Metasphere range of remote monitoring products and solutions for water and wastewater networks and environmental applications is now available through Grundfos.
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