The aquaculture industry needs to monitor the water quality as well as other water and weather parameters for large fish farms, oyster beds, mussel farms and the like.
If ambient conditions are not ideal, if the water becomes too hot, too shallow or too salty, damage to the crop will result. Fish farms may be in regions which are difficult to access, so a telemetry system to measure the conditions on the fish farm and report those conditions on a regular basis is important.
There may also be compliance issues, where the fish farm needs to report to the local authorities, that the water parameters remained within safe limits throughout the growth of the fish crop.
Fish farms can install pole-mounted systems to measure the Electro Conductivity of the water, to make sure it remains within safe limits. If a measuring system is being set up, a hydrostatic depth gauge and a temperature gauge may also be added to the monitoring system.
Typical systems may have a measurement station every 250 meters, in a grid, throughout the farm and have these measurement stations mounted on a pole in the water or floating on a buoy. Appropriate size solar panel and battery should be added to provide power for the system. Choice of a telemetry solution, cell phone, LoRa or satellite, will depend on the coverage available.
A fish farm seawater crop expects seawater to be typically 50,000 micro siemens per centimetre. Rivers flowing close by may dilute the seawater to a freshwater environment, typically 1000 micro siemens per centimetre, which could damage or kill the fish crop.
The water parameters, particularly the electroconductivity would be measured every 5 minutes, and stored locally, before being sent up to a central server each hour. Water depth and temperature sensor could be added so there is a regular check of level and temperature. The Neon Server would be set up to check each reading coming in from the measurement stations and to generate an alarm if there was an out of limits condition.
The alarm could be sent by text to the fish farm manager so remedial action could be taken. Regular monthly reports of the parameters’ levels could also be assembled and sent to compliance authorities to maintain licenses and the like. Fish production/quantities could also be optimised based on long term data from the fish farm environment.
