Thursday, February 06, 2025 11:07:09 AM

The Basics of Disaster and Flood Recovery Monitoring

one year ago
#3484 Quote
1.  Purchase Equipment - The DriFi Remote Monitoring kit is designed for monitoring a typical flood recovery.  It comes with 10 x S-11 T/RH/WME sensors and one G-4 gateway with Verizon cellular data service which is enough for a typical loss with up to 3 affected areas.  You can purchase additional sensors and gateways "a la carte" and any sensor we have ever sold works with any gateway we have ever sold going back to 2003 when we started OmniSense and sold our first monitoring systems.  The sensors are battery powered and have a 5-7 year battery life when reporting every 5 minutes.  The gateway is wall powered, just plug it in and you are done with gateway and sensor setup.  No pairing required, no phone or app required.  Truly "zero configuration".
2.  Create a OmniSense Monitoring Account - The OmniSense Monitoring web site is where you create your job sites, view your current and historical data, create alarm rules to be notified of events, generate reports and download data.  You can create as many user logins as you need and give different users different privileges such as "Administrator" for full privileges and "Basic" for viewing only privileges.
3.  Create your first job site - Think of a job site as a container or folder where all sensor data for a loss or a claim goes.  Gateways are assigned to a job site and then any sensor that is within wireless range of that gateway automatically shows up on the job site.  There is no "pairing" or manual assigning of sensors to a gateway or a job site.  You do not need a app on your phone as our web site is "mobile friendly".
4.  Install the Gateway - Plug it in to power and verify the Internet LED goes on solid green which indicates it has connected to our server.  
5.  Install the Dehumidifier sensors - Typically sensors will be zip tied to the outlet grill of your dehumidifier.  You should only need to do this once.  This sensor can also act as an asset tag and will document to the carrier that the dehu was at the job site and it was doing useful billable work.  We recommend at least 2 feet of lay flat duct be connected to the dehu outlet to ensure accurate readings.  Without the lay flat duct there is zero chance you will be measuring only outlet air as the vortexes created when air exits the outlet causes mixing with ambient air.  Translation - the T will likely be measured falsely low and the RH falsely high and your grains depression will be smaller than it actually is.  Use the lay flat!
6.  Install Sensors on the sill plate - The sill plate is typically the wettest wood at the job site and a corner of the room is typically the wettest location of the sill plate.  No floor is flat and water runs downhill;  it's the downhill location you want to monitor.  The sensors are mounted with stainless steel screws that are the 2 pins of a pin type moisture meter and the supplied screws are sized to ensure 0.5" penetration into the wood it is mounted to.  This 0.5" depth is chosen as it is roughly the same as the depth that most people go to with a handheld meter and a hammer probe.  You can choose to use any screw length you like to penetrate deeper into the sill plate.  The sill plate sensors are also measuring T/RH so they are used to measure ambient air conditions which establish the GPP of the dehu's inlet air.  
7.  Install a dry standard sensor - The requirement is to dry the structure to pre-loss conditions so you need a dry standard sensor located in a unaffected area to establish what "dry" is for that structure.
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one year ago
#3485 Quote
8.  Name all of the sensors -Each sensor will automatically show up on the job site.  You can edit the description of each sensor to document its function and location.   These names will show up in the final report so make sure they are accurate.
9.  View the data - Do this BEFORE you leave the job site to make sure you are seeing "rational" data from all sensors.  Log in to the monitoring web site from any computer or phone to view data in real time.  Dehu sensors should show hot dry air, sill plate sensors should show wet wood and the dry standard sensor should show dry wood.  Then check your data at least once per day to see if the job is progressing as expected or if adjustments to equipment need to be made.
10.  Create Alarm Rules if you want to be alerted when readings exceed desired limits
11.  Generate a final report - Log in to the web site, click on the "report" button for the job site and then click "generate report".  The report will include easy to read graphs of T, RH and WME.  I find the most useful graph is the WME graph that shows that the structure started wet and there was steady drying progress until it was dry.  Reports can be saved in PDF format for easy inclusion in your final documentation.
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