Flood Alarms and Automated Staff Gauges

At Radio Data Networks, we have a range of affordable, low maintenance, battery/solar powered automated river level staff gauges to choose from to deliver a single or dual level warning concerning rising river or groundwater levels with the option of hydrostatic pressure sensors, radar sensors or RDN’s award-winning Bulk Dielectric Transducer (BDT) sensor. 

Designed for rapid, self-installation, with no complex software or programming, the system can be supplied housed in a variety of housings, including custom fabricated staff gauges, fibreglass stilling tubes, or aluminium streetlamp column bases.

All our sensors deliver level reading to the highest precision, enabling our clients to remotely monitor river levels from our Sentinel365 data platform; set warnings and alarms for high or low river levels, and more. 

Robust & Failsafe BDT Sensing

Using RDN’s unique BDT (Bulk Dielectric Transducer) level transducers for detecting when the water is level exceeding the pre-set limit/s, the BDT has significant advantages over ultrasonic, pressure and float switch technology, as it can detect and report issues associated with silt, ice and weed that can lead to the failure of the other technologies. 

Further, the BDT has a proven track record in the utility sector where they have collectively accumulated over 5 billion hours of service, since they were first introduced in 2010.

Battery or Solar Powered

The system is ultra-low power in operation, consuming in standby just a few microamps. This makes it possible for us to supply a system with up to 10-years’ service life on a single battery pack.

Alternatively, the system can be supplied with solar assistance / rechargeable lithium technology which can extend the battery life further or allow for the more frequent reporting of levels.

Automated Self Reporting

The systems are designed to automatically report typically twice daily, thereby instilling the confidence in flood wardens and the community that the system will work when needed.

Contained within this message is the overall pass / fail of the “System Test”, the status of the Battery High or Low, the state of the solar charger Off or Charging (where applicable), and two engineering values associated with the two BDT Level sensors and an incrementing message number.

With solar powered systems, normally, during the day (depending upon the position of the sun and weather) the solar charger in on and Charging and at night the solar charger is off.

Accelerated Alarm Reporting

When the water level reaches midway up the tip of BDT level sensor, the level change is detected and wakes the unit from sleep and an alarm message is compiled and broadcast.

To ensure that the staff are responsive, the alarm is resent every 5-minutes whilst the flood condition exists.

In the example below this is for a dual BDT level system with a two transducers placed above each other to give a high and high-high level warning.

Automatic Fault Reporting

The fault message, as below is generated if the unit finds a defect with one of the BDT level sensors or one of the cables is cut or damaged. This is an important function as cables can become damaged by rodents or excessive use of brush cutters when clearing reeds.

Our smart monitoring systems deliver river depth to mm accuracy and can include measurement points and data can be routed in real-time to existing telemetry, BMS, SCADA, cloud or our Sentinel365 data platform.