{"id":74,"date":"2018-12-28T12:09:01","date_gmt":"2018-12-28T02:39:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sighmon.com\/says\/?p=74"},"modified":"2019-01-02T20:09:14","modified_gmt":"2019-01-02T10:39:14","slug":"water-quality-monitor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sighmon.com\/says\/water-quality-monitor\/","title":{"rendered":"Water quality monitor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Six months ago I moved to Williamstown Beach<\/a> just outside of Melbourne. It’s a nice beachside town about 15km from the centre of the city. The beach is a couple of blocks away via a walk through the botanic gardens<\/a> – a pretty ideal place to replenish after long days in front of computers (my day jobs include being a software developer for ACMI<\/a> and New Internationalist<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The beach here has a really diverse crowd – many countries of Africa are represented, as well as a large portion of southern Europe and Asia. It’s a really popular place for both families with young kids and pets, as well as groups of teenage and 20-something friends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there is one blot on this otherwise idyllic bay, and that’s a big waste water drain that exits right next to the swimming beach. A waste water drain wouldn’t be so much of a big deal on its own, but Williamstown’s proximity to a large shipping port, industrial area, and oil refinery made me curious to see whether the output of it is at all tainted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That curiosity peaked after a recent factory fire<\/a> and subsequent rains forced the local council to put up signs warning that the water was unfit to swim in or even for pets to play in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EPA Victoria has a twitter account that tweets water quality<\/a> for beaches<\/a>, but it doesn’t seem to have an entry for Williamstown and some of the alerts are based on historical data. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I decided to start building my own monitoring system, to see what the cost would be to setup alerts of my own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My first stop was the Public Lab Water Quality Sensor<\/a> project. Being five years old there are a lot of broken links, but there was one that was useful – the link to Atlas Scientific<\/a> sensors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also read up about the different water quality parameters<\/a> you can measure:<\/p>\n\n\n\n