Glastonbury Festival Event Organisers Choose Omniflex Wireless Telemetry Equipment To Ensure Water Is Delivered

The Festival takes place in a beautiful location in the Vale of Avalon and the site is ENORMOUS - more than a mile and a half across, with a perimeter of about eight and a half miles. During the Festival period the local population increases by around 175,000 people.

The Challenge

The infrastructure now necessary to host such an event is diverse and complicated. Glastonbury was 40 years old this year and has grown hugely since it first started in 1970. The Glastonbury Festival now requires more than 1 million gallons of water over a period of five days. There are over 700 hand basins and 100 standpipes located around the site to provide fresh water for drinking and washing. As the festival has grown so to has the demand for a good supply of water to all the facilities across the site.

In order to address this requirement, two new 2million litre capacity reservoirs and a pumping station have been built at the highest point on the site. Previously road tankers were used to import water onto the site, which was then stored in ‘Bladder Tanks’ around the site.

The conditions for holding this year’s festival demanded a water pressure of 1.2 bars at the vast number of water outlets.

The challenge was therefore to ensure water pressure measurements at various points around the site were constantly available to the pumping station.

The difficulty and cost of installing some type of cable infrastructure meant that a radio telemetry system was the best option.

The Solution

After reviewing alternative bids and carrying out field trials, Glastonbury chose the Omniflex M2G RTU’s. The system installed comprised of 3 off M2R 868Mhz radio telemetry systems in the form of two slave units located at different points on the perimeter of the festival and one master unit located at the pumping station.

Sequence of Operation

Pressure sensors located in the pipe-work provide 4-20ma analogue input signals into the two slave units, which then transmit this data via the 868Mhz un-licensed radio frequency to the master unit situated in the pumping station. This data is then supplied via the RS232/485 Serial modbus port into an ABB controller, which is responsible for bringing on line or taking off line a bank of pumps within the pumping station, dependant on the demand for water.

The M2R units are capable of accepting both Digital and Analogue inputs. Although this years project required analogue inputs only it is the intention to increase the functionality of the system for future festivals. The M2R units are capable of accepting both Digital and Analogue inputs.