A remote water meter reader is an electronic meter reader able to read and transmit wirelessly water meter readings. Meters generate pulses and the remote water meter actually does pulse counting.
How does electronic meter reader work?
Inside the water meter are multiple dialers .Each dialer rotates as the water flows through the meter. Each dialer represents a digit on the water meter screen. There are digit dialers for the digits before the decimal point and fraction dialers for the digits after the decimal point.
On one of the dialers, there is a magnet pointer. It typically looks a bit differently from any other pointer. There is either a triangular shape, or a different color. The magnet pointer really means that on that dialer there is a magnet. As the magnet rotates it can generate pulses through a pulse counter on each turn. In the example above we see that the magnet pointer is on the 0x001 dialer. This effectively means that one rotation of that dialer means that 0x01 m3 of water has been consumed. Which actually is equal to the value of the previous dialer.
Pulsers for electronic meter reading
The next piece in the remote water meter reading puzzle is the pulse output which is also known as pulser. Effectively pulsers are cables with a reed switch or other pulse generation electronic element. There are reed switch pulsers or electronic pulser. Reed switch pulsers generate dry contact pulses. Electronic pulsers generate open collector/S0 pulsers.
The final piece of the puzzle is the pulse counter. The pulse counter is able to count the pulses that your meter generates. Effectively the electronic meter reader is a pulse counter. With it your water meter will become from a normal water meter a smart meter 🙂 Many people call that process retrofitting – retrofitting is the process where you retrofit an existing water meter with pulse output with a data logger.
Data loggers are electronic pulse counters. If the data logger has telemetry that means that you have an electronic meter reader able to send data to a remote server for billing or monitoring purposes.
There are various kinds of pulse counters – some only count and know the last digit. Others like ThingsLog data loggers not only count but also record inside their memory per certain period the current meter reading.
How does remote water meter reading looks together?
ThingsLog Data loggers are remote water meter reader devices able to log our water consumption and transmit it over the air. In ThingsLog the data is transmitted to our remote water meter read system –ThingsLog IIoT platform where it is stored, analyzed and visualized.
ThingsLog remote water meter reading platform is suitable for end-users but also for utility personnel, facility managers, and other people that care about smart water.
Remote water meter reading – graph data
In the above example the remote water meter reader data has been used for leak detection.
ThingsLog mobile app allows users to monitor consumption on their phones and get promptly notifications about water leaks.
Water and flow meter is the base of any “smart” metering, DMA/NRW monitoring, flow monitoring and control without that simple technology any of those acronyms won’t be possible.
In ThingsLog the remote water meter reading is part of our smart monitoring solutions – “Smart water” use case. It covers smart water metering, water pressure monitoring and tank level monitoring.
If you are interested in please contact us.
Conclusion
Finally, in this post, we have reviewed the complete remote water meter reader use case – a device able to read pulses from water meters, transmit them wirelessly to a platform, convert the data to meaning full information and finally show it in a nice way to utility operator and the end-user.
