Introduction

Here in East Central Ohio we face increasing pressure from fracking. This pressure comes in two forms, fracking well development, and injection wells used to dispose of the waste brine solution from fracking. A majority of the residents of our county and surrounding counties get their drinking water from private wells. My goal is to build a network of monitoring sites around the area to watch for changes in water quality. To do this I need to develop a low cost dissolved solids meter and data logger that can be deployed by a Citizen Science network to monitor changes in the water. The data logger has been solved by Ed Mallon at the Cave Pearl Project and other brilliant makers. The issues I face is the probe to attach to the data logger.

The issues around conductivity probes seem to break down into several areas:

1. Probe geometry and materials - material, size, spacing, number of emitter/receptors, location in the container/water profile

2. Voltage generator/data reader - AC/DC (not the band...;-), duration, amount of voltage, best generator/reader hardware (lets go for the simplest circuit to get the job done)

3. Calibration and replicability.

I've found a few ideas in all three of these areas that I plan to explore. I will be posting links and updates. I know there has been work done on this site that should link to this project. Working on it. Help is always welcome. Ideas as well.

https://publiclab.org/q/17365

https://publiclab.org/questions/roberts_ecofarm/10-24-2018/voltage-generation-for-conductivity-sensor