Cairns City Council
Water and Waste Water Management
Cairns is the hub of the tourist Mecca in Far North Queensland. The many natural attractions include tropical rainforest, lakes and waterfalls, the Great Barrier Reef and the warm winter weather. Among its many responsibilities, the City of Cairns provides water and waste water services for the Cairns area which doubles in population at the peak of the winter tourist season.
MacroView acts as a telemetry system for the remote monitoring of the water and waster water system consisting of two treatment plants, the city's reservoir system and approximately 200 pump stations.
Benefits
The ability to monitor the water and waste water systems through trending of data, alarms and reporting has resulted in:
- Better monitoring of critical applications such as pump status and communications.
- The ability to use paging for critical alarms.
- Greater integrity of the system allowing for better pollution control and water conservation.
There is also higher redundancy in the system even during catastrophic weather conditions through:
- The use of three levels of redundancy including dual hot-swap servers in two geographically independent locations.
- Access from technicians homes via the MacroView client software.
System Features
The system includes:
- Sub-MacroView systems each managing its own dedicated telemetry system.
- A master MacroView which gathers data from the whole telemetry system.
- MacroView installations at the water and waste water treatment plants.
- data gathering from RTUs located at pump stations and reservoirs and PLCs in the treatment plants.
- advanced reporting of water usage and pump run-times.
Future Direction
The system also has the capacity to perform:
- Energy management through off-peak scheduled pump start times.
- Demand driven flow rates to the treatment plants to avoid over-capacity.
- Intranet access to critical information.
- Flow monitoring to avoid pressure build-ups and corresponding extra pump duty, maintenance and operating costs.
