Kielder Water & Dam Monitoring

Kielder Water & Forest Park Development Trust is a charitable organization in the United Kingdom, working at Kielder Water to promote its sustainable development and improve knowledge of the natural environment at and around the reservoir and forest.  A key element of this work is to ensure the continued integrity of Kielder Dam wall, and the safety of the communities and environment in the catchment area fed by the reservoir; some 23,000 people and 120 businesses.

The client’s need

To implement an IoT-based monitoring system to monitor the stability of the dam wall and the volume of water entering the reservoir from its tributaries. The whole area around the reservoir has reduced or no cell phone network coverage, and therefore the communications solution supporting the monitoring network needed to consume low power and have long durability, low maintenance and support a very reliable and secure data transfer from sensors to users.

Our solution

The Insight Platform deployed for Kielder Water & Forest Park has three key components:

• Edge-based hardware, data collection, aggregation and data transfer
• Cloud-based Insight Platform for near real-time data processing and management
• Web-based customizable dashboard for visualization of remotely collected data which has been validated, enriched, curated and securely stored.

To address the need for reliable and resilient communications at this remote location, the solution also incorporates an all-weather telecommunications kiosk. The kiosk houses the edge computer node, power storage/management, LoRaWAN gateway and Inmarsat satellite terminal, and is supported by a wind-turbine and PV solar arrays for totally independent remote operation.

How is Kielder Water benefiting from our solution?

Kielder Water & Forest Park Development Trust now has real-time, continuous and detailed insight into the key critical risk control factors that might affect the integrity the dam and the surrounding environment of the reservoir and downstream catchment area, including:

• Displacement or distortion of the dam wall;
• Water levels (‘freeboard”) of all tributaries supplying water to the reservoir;
• Additionally, the status of any instrument and its associated power source is monitored and known at all times.  

Project Partners

Insight Terra worked with several partners on this project, including Mconnected.