Water is the single most important element for our health and environment. What can we do to preserve it? Monitoring its quality is a good start. Be it a swimming pool, an agricultural crop, a municipal water facility or a remote well in Africa, preserving clean water can help both reduce unnecessary waste and benefit our health.

Water quality measurement can be expensive and time-consuming. This is because its parameters are not only physical, but also chemical and biological, requiring some of them to be sampled and analyzed at laboratories.

Even though there are more than 30 parameters in water, our challenge was to develop an online monitoring system under these premises:

Simple: Can be build by a non-technical user

Stable: Can be left unattended and charge itself through solar energy

Low-cost (under $200 USD): We integrate commercial hardware and software tools to measure a basic set of parameters that, analyzed in context, can give a sense of the water quality, namely: pH, ORP (Oxidation-Reduction Potential) and Temperature.

You could easily be able to extend this project to measure other parameters like Conductivity or Dissolved Oxygen; just purchase the respective probes and connect them to the analog inputs of the Board.

Check out this specific deployment and instructions to create your own model.

Although we used a Seeeduino Stalker Kit, you can use a microcontroller board of choice.
​

This article was originally published in Ubidots' Blog on June 14, 2015.