Water

EcoSchools UK

How much water do we use at Ringwood School? Our water audit of 2003 suggested that we use too much! We didn't know quite how much that was as there was no way in which we could check meter readings. For some time, we wondered what we should do about this.
Radcom to the rescue! Radcom (Technologies) Ltd. is a Romsey company that is keen to support the local community. It designs and manufacture of innovative, low power consumption battery powered, data logging and control systems for the water and environmental industries. Visit their website here. On Wednesday June 1st (school half term), Radcom fitted one of their latest telemetry data loggers onto the water meter supplying Ringwood School. This automatically logs the school's water usage throughout the day in 15 minute sample periods, and monitors the minimum night line flow. Radcom are currently working with Bournemouth Water to improve the telemetry signal strength from the logger, by relocating the logger's antenna above ground.
What does the data logger show? The initial Data from the logger can be seen in the screen shot below. Flow rate during the school half term holiday is clearly very low and some 15 minute logging periods receive no pulses from the meter. Therefore the graph is very spiky. As term starts again we can expect a different pattern.  We hope that it will  also show a much lower flow (ideally zero) during the night. If the night flow does not go down to zero, then we are wasting water, either due to leakage or perhaps from uncontrolled automatic toilet flushing etc.
The logger is installed	Click on the graph to enlarge it ...