Overview
Grays Harbor County Water District #2 is a small water district serving the Central Park community in far Western Washington. Grays Harbor County is a largely rural county and Central Park is a semi-rural area. The water district serves 1,408 connections, 56 of which are commercial connections predominantly along Washington State Highway 12.
In 2008 the District converted from analog controls to a SCADA system. The system installed was the “industry standard” operating in a Windows environment and was very expensive to purchase and maintain.
Reg Hearn, General Manager Grays Harbor County Water District #2 says: "It was also, in my view, very primitive. It was prone to problems which could only be fixed on-site by the vendor.”
Being dissatisfied with this software, and with the Windows operating system, they began looking for alternative solutions.
The first decision was to abandon MicroSoft and the Windows operating system and go to a Linux operating system. They chose the Ubuntu distribution.
Next they had to find a SCADA system that was compatible with the Linux operating system. They discovered that many of the offerings were written by individuals, many of those individuals were college students and the software was a class project.
Additionally, a significant number of the companies professionally developing SCADA software are located in foreign countries. On several occasions the customer encountered language difficulties, both in getting questions answered and within the software itself.
The Results
The customer and the Mango team worked through the implementation together.
Mango easily integrated into the existing controller and equipment and provided a very user- friendly web-based HMI that could be viewed from any device.
The customer also utilizes the powerful Excel reporting capabilities and configured Mango to email a daily report that was a huge improvement over the previous SCADA systems reports.
The Mango team has been able to do all of its troubleshooting, upgrades and fixes on line, eliminating the cost and scheduling problems of having to have someone on-site.