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Taggle: Gathering Water Meter Data From the Most Inhospitable Environments
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ranular data on the volume and timing of water use is of great value to water providers and companies. Unfortunately, it can be hard to gather. Water meters are often located in difficult-to-reach or inhospitable environments. Taggle Systems is one company working to solve this problem. With its proprietary low-power radio system and its rugged devices, it can gather regular data from water meters in extremely hot, tropical environments—or from the water meters in your municipal or company system. In this interview, John Quinn, the managing director of Taggle Systems, speaks with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about his company’s innovative and rugged technology. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
Joshua Dill: Would you give us an overview of Taggle’s history and what it does?
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John Quinn: The concept that originally gave Taggle its start was to monitor and locate cattle via radioenabled ear tags. Cattle don’t like weight on their ears, so reducing the tags’ weight was paramount. This necessitated using as small a battery as possible, which led the company to develop expertise in low-power solutions. Working with farming communities, however, is a particularly difficult challenge. The first part of that challenge is figuring out how to connect with them. The farming community is diverse and is spread all over the country, so building a sales and marketing plan to reach them and then making that business model commercially viable was difficult. As a result, Taggle looked for other opportunities to use its great low-power radio technology and worked out that water meters presented a good opportunity. Why water meters? First of all, there’s one on every house in Australia. Second, they’re near water, so electric devices are not a good idea. Third, water meters tend to last for a long time, so building a long-lasting, radio-controlled device to sit on the side of a water meter seemed like a really good use of the technology. The company went looking for monitoring facilities that had problems that it could address and came across the Mackay Regional Council in North Queensland. The Mackay Regional Council was particularly interesting to work with because it was a fast-growing community. It had a significant mining industry, and
PHOTOS COURTESY OF TAGGLE.
John Quinn: I started my career in technology, initially as a business analyst in information technology. As my career progressed, I moved into sales and marketing, which gave me the ability to craft solutions for specific customer problems. When the opportunity with Taggle was presented to me, the company’s technical capabilities and the opportunity to provide solutions to the particular problems faced by the water sector was compelling.
A taggle device on a water meter.
