Pump Monitoring with FleetZOOM

FleetZOOM lift station monitoring for municipal water and wastewater provide pump station telemetry for the entire network of large pumps and tanks throughout a city or highway system that move water from one elevation to another.

FleetZOOM pump monitors watch pumps and tanks that provide drinking water to homes and businesses, remove wastewater and even manage runoff by pumping out large volumes of water in recessed street areas such as underpasses, large dips in the street or natural valleys.

Water will collect in areas of the street if it is not pumped out. The reliable operation and maintenance of these pumps is usually the responsibility of the city or the department of transportation where the pump stations are located.

While periodic visits to pump stations by maintenance personnel can help, continuous, real time, remote pump station monitoring provides better service to the city's residents. It saves the responsible city or department of transportation a great deal of money, while simultaneously improving the quality of service. It also reduces the likelihood of service interruption or unexpected emergency maintenance.

Drinking water pump stations usually have at least two pumps that alternate each pump cycle for both redundancy and mechanical wear on the pump impellers and motors. These systems are commonly called duplex pump stations and in some cases triplex pump stations when three pumps are used for one site.

Each time the pump controller determines pumping is needed, a toggling series of motor starters alternates evenly to run each pump to run every second or third pumping event. The pump controller is responsible for starting the pumps and makes decisions about when to run the pumps based on a combination of wet well (tank level), water pressure, and flow rates.

These parameters can be continuously monitored with any of the FleetZOOM pump monitoring devices and notify maintenance personnel if any monitored signal gets out of its appropriate range.

A pump run time logger is used to monitor the duty cycle, or the percentage of time the pumps are being run and the run time for each pumping cycle. A pump's life is unnecessarily shortened if the pump is turned on and off too frequently.

The FleetZOOM pump run time monitor can track each pump run time, the total run time over a day, week or any time frame needed for reporting. If the pump is running too much, or turning on and off too frequently, maintenance personnel are notified so adjustments can be made to the pump controller settings.

Many of the same monitoring features desired for drinking water pump controls are utilized on a wastewater pump monitor.

In typical wastewater lift station systems a large wet well (or tank) is utilized to store wastewater for short periods of time which also enables the substation to handle surges in wastewater flow which are common during certain times of each day.

Some wastewater lift stations are not connected to municipal wastewater systems at all, so "pumper trucks" have to collect the wastewater periodically. Without wastewater pump monitoring these pumping services have to visit the tank far more often than necessary to make sure the tank does not overflow since the fill rate of the wet well is variable.

FleetZOOM remote pump station monitoring systems report the wet well level and these unnecessary trips can be avoided saving fuel, personnel time, and ultimately saving the responsible city or municipality a great deal of money.