Agri Kultuur February / Februarie 2016 | Page 12

Article by Brynn Simpson Deep Blue Aqua Photos by Ruben van der Merwe O ur company (Deep Blue Aqua) has been involved as a supplier to the aquaculture and live-holding industry in Southern Africa for just over 8 years. One of the areas we deal with is monitoring and control on aquaculture operations. Back in the mid 90’s I worked as a production manager on an abalone farm. My boss at the time was not fond of automation, preferring manual operational and decision-making processes. When offered automatic startup on a new generator, his response was he would rather have the duty manager come in to the farm and turn the generator on himself whenever there was a power outage. His point was that things often go unseen when you rely too much on automation – particularly when your manager stays in bed when the power goes off on a cold and wet winter’s night, thinking the auto-changeover on the generator is going to click in! There is obviously a balance between automation and manual systems and one needs to have the checks and balances in place to ensure all runs smoothly. Wherever OxyGuard oxygen & temperature probe in sump we position ourselves on manual/automation scale, the checks and balances are often provided in the form of readings off a monitoring system. These systems and their readings provide valuable information for the decision making process on the fish farm. Monitoring systems will range from simple “manually” operated handheld units carried around by technicians, through to complex systems with a series of stationary probes linked via wireless to a central computer that is accessible over the internet. At their most critical use, monitoring systems function as alarm systems to alert us to emergency situations – these have been common practice for years. Generally they are linked to a GSM module that sends an SMS to a cell phone indicating the alarm triggered. An example would be notification that a pump has stopped or a power outage. Monitoring systems are used for early warning on critical and non-critical parameters. A variety of parameters can be measured with probes (DO, ORP, Temp, CO 2, Campbell Scientific pH probe with cleaning device Control system for solenoid units