Harris County Water Control and Improvement District #1 (HCWCID#1), which serves the town of Highlands, Texas has deployed SCADA for the first time in its history.

"I was keen to have the ability to monitor my sites but I was deterred by the potential cost and complexity of deploying SCADA" said HCWCID#1 General Manager Mark Taylor.

HCWCID#1 chose the Metasphere SCADA As A Service (SAAS) solution which is a cloud-based solution and so avoids the cost and complexity of installing and maintaining a traditional SCADA server.

At each sewer lift station site, HCWCID#1 installed a Metasphere Point Orange RTU. The latest RTU product from Metasphere is a battery powered, IP68, GPRS communications-based device. The unit was configured to monitor pump starts and stops (to calculate pump hours run) as well as wet well level and mains power. "HCWCID#1 staff had to visit each site daily to manually read the pump hours run. As well as being a time consuming process, it is prone to error. The SCADA installation included a sensor that attached to the existing cabling to detect pump starts and stops, making manual reads unnecessary," said Taylor.

At their Water Tower and Well sites HCWCID#1 deployed a Metasphere MMIM. The MMIM units were programmed using the STRATON IEC61131-3 programming language to calculate pump hours run as well as monitor critical functions. An additional benefit of the new GPRS solution was that HCWCID#1 could remove their costly and unreliable auto-dialer circuits that had been used to connect the sites and report alarms.

"I'm very pleased we've finally installed SCADA. Not only can we now see what's happening on all of our sites but we are able to deploy the staff to perform more proactive tasks. In addition the savings from using the auto-dialer circuits help improve the Return on Investment." said Taylor.