MultiTrode offers a 100% Mercury-Free Level Sensing Probe

Mercury is a powerful neurotoxin that can cause irreversible damage to the brain and nervous system of humans and wildlife. Flow meters, generally used by the water and wastewater industries to measure the flow rate of liquids, contain up to 5 kg of elemental mercury.

The MultiTrode Probe is an unbeatable 100% mercury-free alternative to ball floats.

Several States have begun to ban the sale of mercury-containing products: California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont & Washington

Act now to ensure your system is free of mercury.  Why wait?
States governments have pursued legislation focused on the reduction or elimination Display complete post

Darcy Sullivan Mercury Ban ball floats, floats, lelvel sensing probe, level sensing devices, Mercury Ban

MultiTrode is headed to Orlando, Florida. We will be exhibiting at the FSAWWA Florida Section Fall Conference from November 29th through December 2nd. Please stop by booth #525 to visit with sales team members. 

There, you will have the opportunity to check out the latest versions of MultiSmart and the new SafeSmart Backup Controllers, Safe-FS and Safe-TL .

The featured Safe-FS ,  SafeSmart’s failsafe level alarm relay, is the next generation of ultra-reliable high level alarming for lift and pump stations. While the Safe-TL , provides an independent backup control system for level device fails. Display complete post

Darcy Sullivan General News backup controllers, FSAWWA, lift station, MulitSmart, pump station

I traveled to New Zealand recently to give Applied Instruments a hand with a large trade show. Applied Instruments are the sole distributor in New Zealand for Multitrode. The expression of interest received for the MultiSmart this year was massive compared to that of last year.

We were able to take over 140 quality feedbacks over the 2 ½ days of the conference. Of those 75 were directly aimed at the MultiSmart and other MultiTrode products. Last year we received only 28 enquiries and I considered only 22 to be “quality” enquiries.

The full sized demonstration pump station cabinet drew the most interest followed by the MultiSmart controlled waste water neutralization system. In the neutralization system the MultiSmart controls the switching of the sump pumps according to level and performs several custom functionalities.

The MultiSmart also accepts the 4-20mA pH signals fr Display complete post

Ron Jackson General News

Drawings of new pits come through my desk nearly every month and most have the MultiTrode Level Sensing Probe already specified, but from time to time I see a ball float right at the top to indicate high level and an alarm. The following figures show the backup level sensing configuration with a ball float and how that configuration matches with the backup Fail Safe Probe sensor design.
 

It seems no one ever thought of changing the ball float to a new and more advanced Fail Safe Probe and install the Fail Safe Relay as well. Ball floats have their place; but when mission critical high level flow’s need a mission critical al Display complete post

Donald Fainges In the well, Industry Backup Level Sensor, Ball Float, Fail Safe Probe, Level Sensing, probe

The MultiTrode Liquid Level Sensing Probe hangs in the wet-well by it’s own cable. When specifying the probe, we need to know:

1.       The probe length, which is the effective detection length. Standard lengths are 1.0m (3’), 1.5m (5’), 2.0m (6’), 2.5m (8’) and 3.0m (10’). Custom lengths are also available on request
2.       The cable length, which has to reach from the top of the probe in it’s normal hanging position, to the junction box or control panel.

In most installations, the probe is sized for the “live” depth of the well, the range that the liquid normally covers. The live range is typically only the bottom 25% – 50% or so of the full wet well depth. E.g. if the wet well is 5m deep, but the invert is 3m below ground level, the live range of the well will be 2.5m, so a 2.5m probe will be used. The probe will be hanging from the top of the we Display complete post

Scott Critchley In the well probe, probe installation

Wayne Patterson, the Chief Executive Officer of MultiTrode, is selected as the Chairman of Australian Institute of Management Queensland and Northern Territory for the period 2009-2010 after its Annual General Meeting in May 2009.

The AIM Qld & NT, founded in 1950, is a not for profit entity promoting the advancement of education and learning in the areas of management and leadership for commerce, industry and government. AIM provides training and conducts seminars on the latest industry trends in corporate management and helps professionals in developing their leadership qualities.

The AIM Qld & NT Board of Directors are chosen by the Professional Members of the Institute, once every two years. By electing Mr Patterson as the new Chairman, the AIM members recognised his more than 20 years experience in building successful businesses.

Mr Patterson, previously the D Display complete post

Praveen Karunambaran General News

MultiTrode has recently released the firmware version 2.2.1 for the MultiSmart Pump Station Manager. This update includes enhancements for achieving higher efficiencies and support for extra security.

Major highlights of this release are,

1) Easy interfacing of selected ABB drives, in just a few button presses
2) Support for Dallas iButton security key
3) Improvised well mixer functionality
4) New Pump Alternation Modes
5) Simplicity in interfacing Rain-gauges
6) Extended pump efficiency calculations and alarming
7) DNP Object 0 support (helps in remote identification of device details and DNP profiles)
8) Improvised VFD configuration menu
9) Enhancements for flow calculations and flow statistics

These new features and enhancements further extend the capabilities of the MultiSmart to continue providing a unique and one stop solution for Pump Station Manage Display complete post

Praveen Karunambaran General News, Industry, SCADA & Telemetry

 
Pump Station performance optimization has become an important feature  for pump stations throughout the world. A well optimized pump station can increase the lifetime of the pumps as well as decrease the cost involved in running the station. Station optimization can also help in reducing the hardware, software and maintenance costs significantly.
However it has been seen that many a times the pump stations (or lift stations) are not designed or maintained close to the best possible solution. Design changes after the Pump Station commissioning for including optimizations features are commonly seen these days.
Majority of the reasons behind this are; inability to identify all the optimization parameters during the design and commissioning phase;  huge costs and time constraints involved with the software reprogramming (PLC programming and SCADA changes) which are quite often Display complete post

Praveen Karunambaran General News, Industry, Technical Notes Lift Station Optimization, Pump Controller Optimization, Pump Station Optimization

Cellular communications has made huge progress in the last few years, and many people would say is a viable solution for water & wastewater telemetry.

The first area that cellular comms started getting attention was for water supply and wastewater collection systems – as a backup to radio.

The requirements would state that radio was the primary communications and cellular GPRS was the backup on more important stations.

We also saw a few utilities who requested cellular as their primary communications method, either because they had had a lot of problems with radio in the past, or because their geography meant that building a radio network was clearly a lot more expensive than using cellular.

Let’s look at the thinking behind the backup first of all.

Historically, in water and wastewater, radio has the been the main method of RTU communications, with PSTN (phone l Display complete post

admin General News Cellular Communication, telemetry

MultiSmart Pump Station Manager, with firmware version 2.2.0 onwards, now includes support for easy interfacing of the ABB ACS550 and ACS800 series VFDs. After a study in the US and UK, it was found that the ABB VFD’s are widely used in Pump Station Controls.
 

 
Having support for the MODBUS RTU capability MultiSmart can be interfaced to any VFD’s with MODBUS support for bringing the data in and to send controls to the drives, and these data can be easily brought to a SCADA system. This process is fairly easy and straight forward with the help of the buttons on the MultiSmart faceplate. The only time consuming part is adding the MODBUS points by going through the VFD data sheet.
However, after identifying the customer demands, this integration process is further si Display complete post

Praveen Karunambaran General News, Technical Notes ABB, ACS550, ACS800, MultiSmart

The Blue Ocean Strategy is a great book by Kim and Mauborgne (Harvard Press) that looks at how exciting new  products can be created at the development stage by focusing on uncontested market space.

In the book the authors argue that instead of companies trying to be better than the competitors and fighting over market share they should instead focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating uncontested Blue Ocean market places where new demands of customers are satisfied.  Rather than trying to beat the competition at their own game businesses looking for uncontested space should answer four questions:

• Which of the factors that our industry takes for granted should be eliminated?
• Which factors should be reduced well below the industry’s standard?
• Which factors should be raised well above the industry’s standard?
• Which factors should be created t Display complete post

Wayne Patterson, CEO General News, Industry MultiSmart, Pump Controller, Pump Station Management

This station is one of the four major stations in Greenwich, CT USA.  It pumps directly into the force main and sees an inflow of about 500 GPM into its very small well. If you would like to see video of the inflow into the well send me an email. If the station were to go down there will almost certainly be an overflow because they have only 20 minutes to respond. The station is equipped with a 2 VFD’s , backup generator,  mixer and a grinder.

The PLC operating the station used PID to keep a constant level in the well but the alternation feature did not work so someone would visit the station everyday to alternate the lead pump via the touch panel. The station used to have a an indicator panel separate from the PLC display that indicated what alarms were present. All three components (PLC, touch panel, indicator) were removed and only a MSU3MP took their Display complete post

Praveen Karunambaran General News colacino, greenwich, MultiSmart

When someone talks about the capital infrastructure of a water or waste water utility or authority they are referring to things like the pipe networks, the lift stations, water mains and treatment plants a utility owns and is responsible for. These are usually very large and costly investments by any standard and that is why most times the owner of the assets must levy fees in the form of taxes when other government funds cannot be found.
 
Asset management is the term used to describe the management of this infrastructure in a way that minimizes total costs. These costs are made up of the cost of investment, operating costs, maintenance costs and the eventual cost of replacing the assets at the end of their life cycle.
 
Asset management for our customers is all about the analysis of information in order to make informed decisions about their capital investments. Th Display complete post

Wayne Patterson, CEO General News

In the recent past a few customer enquiries came regarding the capability of MultiSmart to act as a DNP gateway RTU in addition to its standard pump station / lift station management functionality. MultiSmart can certainly act as a RTU gateway along with its normal functionality; however, it has certain memory constraints which limit the number of DNP slave profiles it can support within the gateway.

To come up with an alternate solution we decided to trial the Linux based MultiTrode applications for the communication on an Embedded PC. A small form factor MOXA V481-XPE is selected for the testing and implementation. The MOXA V481 is a compact, DIN – rail mountable, industrial embedded PC with relatively good hardware resources. The additional advantage with this MOXA PC is that it has got 8 built in serial ports (all can be configured for RS-232/422/485) and 2 GBit Ethern Display complete post

Praveen Karunambaran Technical Notes

The International Monetary Fund said this month that the world economy was on track to shrink for the first time in 60 years by as much as 1.0 percent. It said that recovery from the recession depends in part on stabilizing financial conditions through the injection of economic stimulus spending. But more telling was the view that the key to success was countries being prepared to work together on solutions.

Time is running out for the leaders of the Group of Twenty who are meeting in London this week. The message they might bring back home with them after the summit is of a deeper recession before things improve.

So what to do when faced with the very real chance of dealing with the worst downturn since the 1930”s depression?  That was a question we asked ourselves recently at MultiTrode. Just like in any other business involved with infrastructure, a slow down in t Display complete post

Wayne Patterson, CEO Industry

v2.1 of MultiSmart firmware is now on the website. Take a look at the recent post to find out what is included in this release.

The firmware can be downloaded if you have been given access to the firmware area . Create a login on the main site and request MultiSmart firmware (one of the checkboxes). If you already have a login, click on “Edit my details” in the top right of the main site. Display complete post

admin General News dnp3 security, MultiSmart, PID

v2.1 of the MultiSmart Pump Station Manager will be released in the next week or two. There’s some great new features included as well as lots of small enhancements and cosmetic upgrades:

PID control, e.g. for constant pressure, constant flow via IsaGRAF
New comms screen making all the communications much easier to setup
Smart Outflow calculation to cater for high inflow conditions
Updated DNP3 security (v2)
Time to spill calculation on the main screen
Generator functionality (e.g., run time and starts)

More about these features in later posts.

 
What else is in v2.1?
Fault finding tool – you can enable DNP3 and Modbus logging on the unit, then view the log on the LCD. We’ll do a post later which shows more about how this works in practice and why it’s useful.

Pump Running by External Control – the display shows when the over-ride is runn Display complete post

admin General News MultiSmart

Following on from the post about MultiSmart v2 ..

Since v2 was released there have been a few minor releases. There are lots of small features and cosmetic improvements with a few more important additions. I highlight in bold  the more interesting ones, but if you are a current MultiSmart user then any one of the smaller items may be important enough for you to want to upgrade.

If you do want to see every last “ticket” (as we call them), you need to get access to the MultiSmart firmware page, which you do by creating a login on the main site and requesting access to MultiSmart firmware. (Or, if you have already signed up, login and click “Edit my details”).

2.0.1 added

Support for Single-Phase AC Monitoring and Fault Detection – important for smaller pump stations so that the “phase fail” functionality can be included
Integrate Acromag IO Devices into screens
Display complete post

admin General News

When you find useful stuff on the web, it can be hard to keep track of it all. You can bookmark it, and in Internet Explorer (or another browser), you assign it to a folder.

Later, you have some memory of a useful website that you found but when you look in a likely folder under your bookmarks there are 50 links. Is it there? It’s hard to be interested enough to find it, so you do another Google search and start over..

I started experimenting with Diigo ( www.diigo.com ) a few days ago.

Diigo is one of many “social bookmarking” websites but seems to have some handy add ons.
What’s a social bookmarking website anyway? They are websites that let you share interesting websites with friends or colleagues.
What diigo offers which makes it more interesting – even if you aren’t interested in any sharing, is you can:

highlight a section (or sections) of a webpage
pin Display complete post

admin General News

An almost universal rule of lift stations is that the engineer designing the lift station does his calculations and adds a safety margin. He or she passes it to someone else in the organization who adds a safety margin. Then it goes back to the city for approval and they add a safety margin.

Finally, there is always the chance that when the PO is with the supplier, he or she says “sorry, we’re out of stock of that model, but I have the next size up – tell you what, I’ll sell it to you for the same price as the smaller pump!”

The net result is pumps which are much too large for the application, running for very short times and not at all at their best efficiency point.

There’s a great article about how VFDs can improve the energy efficiency of pump stations by Joe Evans of Pentair writing for Pumps & Systems . The VFD lowers the effective output of the pump and runs it c Display complete post

admin In the well efficiency, high inflow, lift station