New FAQs (and a not so frequent one)

We do water quality monitoring as a service a bit differently from some others, so get a lot of questions, feel free to add yours in the comments.

We just redid our FAQ's - https://www.aquawatchsolutions.com/faqs

The question we get asked most about the WaQA is whether units get stolen or vandalised. Rarely, touch wood. In more than 700 deployments, one has been lifted out of the water. That triggered our alarm, and we found it on the riverbank when we got to site.

Loss and damage cover is included in our Continuous Water Quality Monitoring as a Service to make sure that even if this changes, a replacement goes out.

Many users are used to fixed sondes, so a self-powered, comms-enabled float raises its own questions. Data analysts tend to like the answer to one of them. Because the Float rides with the surface, every reading comes from the same depth in the water column, whatever the river level is doing.

Other questions are harder to predict.

We were recently asked whether a Float would sink if a seagull landed on it, so we did the maths. The Float weighs 2.3 kg, so at rest it displaces 2.3 litres of fresh water. The hull can carry another 6 to 7 kg before it goes under. A large gull weighs about a kilogram, which means six or seven gulls. This modelling didn't stretch our data team too far.

The lid is a bit bigger than a rugby ball, so there is room for two or three at most. The only way* to get six on board is a pyramid: three at the base, two in the middle and one on top. The research on gull behaviour is reassuring here. Gulls put far more effort into stealing each others food than into cooperating, and the most reliable teamwork on record is between mated pairs. We are comfortable with the risk posed by two seagulls.

*For completeness, we also considered gulls stacking vertically. That would have meant working out the load a gulls legs can bear, which would have left no time for the illustration. So we went back to modelling environmental impact from continuous water quality data. Enjoy the picture.