Quote:
Originally Posted by Maker
Spikes are within one minute. For example, per minute water flow in GPM during one irrigation zone...
3
3
3
7.2
3
3
My potable water per month is 3500-4500 gallons.
Point 2: "A one time spike that triggered a single reading of thousands of gallons (a glitch that shows the meter is defective and that usage is not valid)."
It appears to be happening many times, 1 to 4 times per hour. I know someone else that is compiling lots of data. The sum of all could be quite significant. Who knows if every meter is acting with the same scale of spiking.
|
It isn't clear whether you are seeing valid spikes in water flow or errors in the Flume. In either case you seem to be attributing it to the meter when the meter has no affect on what you are seeing at all.
The Flume is giving you the per minute readings with the spikes, not the meter. Is it possible that whatever is using the 3gpm occasionally draws 7.2gpm? Is it possible that your have a sprinkler type that sometimes allows a surge in flow?
Since these readings are from the Flume, is it possible there is an error in the Flume? The sensor for the Flume devices I have seen doesn't actually touch the water, it listens for the water to flow through the pipe. Is it possible that Flume is "hearing" something that it believes is a 4.2gpm increase but really is not?
And in any case, the water meter does not cause water to flow or regulate the water flow it simply measures what is going through it. The meter doesn't measure how fast the water is flowing (gpm) it measures how much water passed through it (gallons). The change in the rate of flow that you saw in your Flume device has nothing to do with the meter. The meter will simply measure how much water moved through it.
According to the data sheet, the meter ought to be able to give water usage per hour. The spikes you observed would not invalidate those measurements at all. The meter would show how much water passed through it in an hour, regardless of whether the flow was continuous for the entire 60 minutes or spiked four times per hour.
The value of the hourly readings would be to show an impossible water usage. If the hourly readings showed 800gals used each and every hour then they would not help at all. However, if the hourly readings showed 25,000 gals used between 1PM and 2PM then it could very easily be argued that it is not physically possible for water to flow through that meter at a rate of 420gpm. Since the meter registered an utterly impossible number, there must have been an error in the meter.
That would be the value of the hourly readings. Obtaining them is going to be a problem. And even once obtained, they might not show the impossible reading that you would like to see.