Measurement Expert Blog

Maintenance is important, but it’s often hard to quantify. How much time does maintenance take? How often does your system need it? Does maintaining one part necessitate a complete system shut down? What does that represent in lost income because your system is not making product? Maintenance is important, but minimizing maintenance is even more important.

Maintenance is also important for your sensors. While everyone (yes, us, too!) would really like for sensors to maintenance free for life, reality dictates that all equipment needs a check-up from time to time. It’s true for pumps and motors, and it’s true for sensors.

So, when’s the last time you gave your ultrasonic sensor a checkup?

Some resources are easy to keep tabs on. They are located conveniently close to monitoring equipment and power supplies, which are, in turn, easily integrated into your facility’s management systems. Press a button or click a mouse, and all you need to know pops up on a screen. It’s the ideal scenario, really.

Other resources, as many of you are keenly aware, are much more difficult to monitor. And, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families who are each unhappy in their own ways, each difficult monitoring scenario presents its own challenges. You might have one resource that is physically isolated from the majority of your resources. Or, perhaps the majority of your resources are isolated from each other. Or maybe power isn’t an issue, but network or control system access is. Or there isn’t any physical space for new cables or conduit. Each is difficult in its own ways.

One technology that continues to find new ways to overcome these difficulties is wifi radio. It may not solve all of your problems (yet), but with its flexibility, it might solve more than you realize.

A couple months ago we took a brief look at how the agriculture industry is turning to automation and data to help monitor product and resource levels, enabling farmers and ranchers to be proactive, rather reactive, about the needs and conditions of their businesses. We all agreed that there are plenty of opportunities for level measurement in the modern agriculture industry.

But what of pressure measurement? Its presence could be inferred from that article, but it was not specifically addressed. So let’s take another walk through the farm and see where pressure gauges and transmitters can help make life a little bit easier.

Let’s be honest with each other. (It’s ok, we’re all friends here, right?) When you think of continuous liquid level measurement, magnetic float level sensors aren’t the first thing you think of. And when you do think of them, your first instinct isn’t “Hey! That’s the perfect sensor technology for this job!”

It’s ok, you’re not alone. The excuses come easy: too much upfront effort to determine the length of the stem; no idea what kind of float to use; more expensive to transport; difficult to store and install. Yeah, we’ve heard them all.

But notice what doesn’t come to mind: maintenance, ease of use, reliability, and durability. That’s because you don’t have to worry about any of these issues with a magnetic float level sensor. They are simple to use, and highly durable, which translates to incredibly low maintenance and long-lasting reliability. Let’s take a closer look.