At the Indian Valley Dam and Reservoir, located in Lake County California, the Yolo County Flood Control & Water Conservation District uses AKCP’s sensorProbe8 to monitor water flow over 350 feet below ground.
The Indian Valley reservoir is six miles long and 1 mile wide with a max gross capacity of 300,600 cubic feet. It provides long term irrigation storage for Yolo County. The District manages the water that the reservoir holds by releasing it as needed. The Dam includes a hydroelectric plant.
The sensorProbe8 is located in a tunnel deep inside the Dam, where it monitors water flow in two pipes. One pipe is a 60″ main with a maximum capacity of around 750 cf/s. The other is a 14″ pipe usually run at 10 cf/s. The water runs to a hydroelectric power plant and is then delivered to farms for irrigation. A two channel, AT868 Acoustic Doppler Flow Meter, has sensors attached to each pipe. The AT868 converts the flow to a 4-20mA signal which in turn sends the signal to our sensorProbe8 .
The flood control district office is located in Woodland California, some 85 miles from the dam site. Max Stevenson, a water resource associate for Yolo County, says:
“Since our headquarters is so far from the dam site, which is located in the rural backcountry, accessible only via a gravel road, we needed a remote solution for monitoring water flow at the site. AKCP’s product seemed to be the best solution for us. The sensorProbe is connected to a CAT5 cable, which continues down the tunnel another 550 feet to another location and our connection back to our WAN. This not only eliminates traveling to the dam site, but allows us to monitor the water flow from our office”.
Stevenson also adds
” I just love the ease of the sensorProbes GUI, the embedded web server, and the Ethernet jack. So many companies that make instrumentation hardware (water quality probes, flow meters, well water depth recorders, etc) still have not updated the hardware interfaces on their products. They all still have serial ports! “
