The phone rings at the office. A client is calling to tell us he ran out of water. All the alarms go off. All hell breaks loose, and we have no clue of what is happening. There is no time to lose: we must go immediately on-site to see and diagnose what the problem is.At that time, we had been making good quality groundwater wells for the past 35 years, but those wells were completely silent in terms of status information.

At that time, we asked ourselves:

• How can we minimize uncertainty and solve reported failures with as much information as possible?
• How can we provide a more efficient service?
• Is it possible to get ahead of these failures and prevent them from happening?

So, bringing together our experience in groundwater wells and hydraulic systems with Nettra’s technology, we developed Smart-Wells … and everything changed.

Smart-Wells is a telemetry and remote-control system for wells that is made up of several elements:

• A flowmeter to have the history of flows and volumes of water extracted. History is very important to understand the present.
• A water level meter to understand how the aquifer evolves over time and how the well responds to pumping.
• An energy meter to know the electrical characteristics of the pump.
• A hub called RTU-X that collects the information from the different sensors, stores it and transmits it to a cloud platform.
• An IoT cloud platform that stores historical data of each water well and allows the implementation of analytics to trigger alarms and notifications when there is a problem and acts as a visualization and remote-control tool that provides real-time information on the health of each water well.

What do we gain by using smart-wells?

The answer is simple: time and quality of service. The well gives us information that allows us to respond appropriately to a failure. We can go with the necessary spare parts and give a response based on data and historical information. Our company now has a tool that enables us to provide better service to our customers.

And what did our customers gain?

They have a simple and intuitive graphic interface with dashboards that allows them to know their wells and make better decisions. Today they know precisely how much water each well delivers, what the energy efficiency of each one is, how the aquifers evolve, etc.
With this information, they can minimize unplanned stops, improve their operations, and optimize the energy efficiency of their production processes.

But they also have a control tool that allows them to turn the wells on and off remotely and thus use human resources for tasks with greater added value. It is no longer necessary to travel tens of miles to turn a well on or off.

In a nutshell, now their wells are smart!!