Project: Baton Rouge Wastewater Pump Station SCADA System (July 12, 2006)

Our engineering staff successfully completed a third conversion of an existing RTU to Modbus last week , as well as completed commissioning of last week ‘ s second RTU. Write capability was tested before leaving the sites using a wireless wide-area network (WWAN ) enabled notebook. This week we plan a more aggressive schedule and will attempt two RTU Modbus conversions.

This previous month we had an unexpectedly high amount of data transfer charged to the cell account for the first pump station we commissioned. This amounted to 46 megs of overage (23 times the normal amount), for which we were charged a whopping $670 in overages. As we had previously taken necessary steps to limit the amount of data transferred to the 2 meg contracted limit and tested this, we are unclear at this time how such an overage could have occurred. We are currently monitoring the data transfer reported by the cell service provider every several days to determine if their usage rates match with our own measures.

We still await the prime consultant regarding the City’s requirements for alarm notification and reporting.

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