Hold your freeboard. Catch the overflow before it's a violation.

A thin-staffed utility can’t watch the berm all night

Small wastewater systems run lean, often with one or two operators covering everything. A lagoon is patient about it right up until it isn’t. Inflow and rain push the level up a fraction at a time, nobody sees a problem on the morning round, and then a wet week takes the freeboard that was left. By the time the berm is wet at the top, the options have narrowed to the expensive ones.

Remote monitoring buys back the hours between rounds. A sensor watches the level continuously and raises a high-level alarm with margin to spare, so the operator gets a call while there’s still time to draw down, move water, or get on site, instead of finding it after.

What Meterra watches

• Stabilization lagoons. A submerged pressure sensor reads the level and trend, with a high-level alarm that protects freeboard.
• Storage and equalization basins. Confirm the buffer in the system is where it should be, rather than assuming it.
• Transfer and polishing cells. A multi-cell lagoon can hide a stuck transfer for days; two sensors show which cell the water actually went to.

Everything reports to one dashboard with trend history, CSV export, and multi-user alarms.

Freeboard is a number, so measure it like one

Freeboard gets managed by eye at a lot of small systems: a mark on the berm, an operator’s judgment, and a round once a day. That works until the week it doesn’t, and the failure mode is always the same. Nobody saw the rate.

A continuous level record turns freeboard from a glance into a measurement. You get the level now, the level this time last week, and the slope between them, which is the part that says whether a wet forecast is a problem. It also gives you the record afterward: what the lagoon did, when it did it, and what the operator was responding to, exported for the file.

Monitoring without the SCADA bill

Meterra stands alone on a lagoon that has nothing today: battery or solar power, Verizon’s NB-IoT low-power cellular network (LEO satellite where there’s no coverage), no field wiring, and a 15-minute install. It’s the affordable middle ground between a clipboard and a full SCADA system.

Wet wells are a related job with a different shape, and they have their own page. If it’s the lift stations rather than the lagoons keeping you up, start at lift station monitoring.

A note on what this is, and isn’t

Meterra is a monitoring and alerting aid. It does not replace your NPDES permit monitoring, sampling, certified operators, or pump controls, and it doesn’t control equipment. It gives a small utility early warning and a clean record. Confirm your specific obligations with your permit and regulator.

Getting started

Start with the lagoon most likely to surprise you. Tell us the site and coverage, and we’ll set the sensor and the high-level alarm threshold with you.