Nothing like a cold shower to get you moving:

Most of us never give any thought to our hot water service pilot flame. But when it goes out...cold shower first thing in the morning, anyone?

Bleh.

The first time it happened, I simply re-lit the pilot and showered with cold water. After the third cold shower, I knew it was time to be a little more proactive!

High on the list of things you'd rather not do: clean up liquid waste from an overflowing storage tank.

Avoiding this kind of mess is especially good when your business includes storing and disposing of liquid waste from industry and manufacturing.

That's the business Plummer's Environmental Services is in.

Along with a variety of other services—including hydro excavating, manhole rehabilitation, and emergency spill response—the Michigan-based company collects liquid waste from Midwest industrial and municipal customers, stores it, and treats it.

Monitoring the water mains:

As mentioned in my blog last week, it was not until I monitored my water usage that I found out I was not monitoring ALL of my water usage.

My whole house water meter was just that, the whole house. It did not show any of the garden/lawn water use.

Let's talk about how we might get that data and what it could mean for conserving water in all aspects of our lives.

The biggest user of water in our house is not human:

A web browser is installed on most of the key devices we use every day. PCs, smart phones, tablets, even our TVs now have a modern web browser installed. I can even surf the web from my Android smart watch (a Moto360).

It makes sense then, does it not, to view everyday data on an interface that we use every day?

How much water flows through our house was the subject of last week's blog... It both surprised me and pleased me to find out that the biggest user of water in our house was not a human.

You've probably heard about the continuing drought in California.

The U.S. Drought Monitor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln currently categorizes more than 94% of the state's total area as in "severe drought" or worse, and notes that snowpack statewide (from which we get most of our water through the year) is at only 5% of normal.

The worst-hit area is the center of the state, especially the Central Valley that produces many of the vegetables, fruits, and nuts that appear on dining tables throughout the U.S.—and the world.

Visualizing water usage with groov:

As an Australian living in southern California I have been conflicted lots of times driving around seeing green lawns in baking hot sun.

When we moved to California from Australia in 2008, one of the worst droughts in history was still very much a huge issue for Victoria, the state we lived in. So when we arrived, the seemingly endless sea of green really, really surprised us all.

Australians have had little choice but to let their lawns brown off (often totally die) in the summer for many, many years...... It's just a fact of life of living in a sunburnt country.

As soon as we were able to buy our own home, I knew that monitoring our water usage was up near the top of my to-do list.

The challenge was how to share the data with the family, my wife and two teenage kids.

In the Charter Township of Union, Michigan, staff used to have to travel to each equipment location to check on wells, pumping stations, and water treatment plants.

Wastewater Superintendent Michael Dearing and Chief Water Operator Shaun McBride added PCs running HMI software plus remote desktop software to view them, but it wasn't enough.

What they really wanted was a mobile solution to monitor even the smallest installations and check on key process indicators like flow, tank levels, and power consumption.

PC-based HMI software works great when operators are at headquarters, but what if they're not?

Covina Irrigating Co. monitors 12 separate sites in their water distribution system, with an assortment of pumps, tanks, valves, filters, and more at each site.

Operators often need to see equipment data when they're off site. They used to use remote desktop software on a notebook PC, but that method allows only one operator at a time to log in and use the HMI.

Gavin Gray knew from experience about the problems you can run into when you're trying to set up remote monitoring from a mobile interface.

When a water treatment client asked for mobile capability, he wasn't at all sure he wanted to spend the time. A busy integrator and machine builder, Gray had plenty of other work to do.