It's incredible that it's Memorial Day weekend already! The last few weeks have been great and we're staying busy with lots of interesting projects. Here's a few of the events we've been attending lately.

It's always tricky committing to industry golf outings. It doesn't matter how carefully the event is planned and organized, how great the day is ultimately comes down to weather. And this year we got the most perfect weather for the WRWA Golf Outing on May 18. What an amazing day to spend outside! I had a blast selling 50/50 tickets, talking to operators, and soaking up the sun.

The spring Lake Michigan Operators Meeting brought me to Kaukauna for another great meeting. With a room filled with operators and a slate of interesting presentations, a day is always well spent at these meetings. In particular I enjoyed Tom Fitzwilliams' (MSA) presentation on using DNA sequencing to identify bacteria in activated sludge. It's about time we brought some CSI-esque technology to wastewater plants! 

This week brought me to a new-to-me event in Madison - the Wonderware User Conference. It proved to be an interesting and, dare I say it, inspiring day. It's always our goal to keep our SCADA systems user-friendly and very useful to operators, while being accessible to small customers. It was really interesting to see new technology coming out of Wonderware that fits right with this goal. Additionally, seeing how SCADA systems are implemented in different industries provides some food for thought to see how we can creatively integrate some of their solutions into water and wastewater systems. 

A lot of water and wastewater gets moved around in municipal systems. As water gets pumped, treated, used, moved, treated, recycled, and returned to the earth, there are many different points when we need to know how much we have in a basin, tank, well, etc. If a tank is already full of water, we need to either stop pumping into it or pump some out. The key piece to this is the level control indicator.

There are a lot of different kinds of level control instruments. Below is not an exhaustive list, but we thought it'd be useful to put together a quick reference for level control options. Here's a few of the most common level control indicators we see.