Temporary Flow Monitoring in the 80's

I remember back in the mid to late 80's @Teledyne Isco introduced a device called the Flow Poke. It was a portable device with poles that snapped together to allow you to insert a calibrated insert into a 6-, 8-, 10- and 12-inch pipe from outside the manhole.

For low flows you would use the V-Notch and higher flows the Round Orifice.

Initially this was only available as a portable manned device. Where the operator inflated the bladder to hold the unit in the pipe.

And then manually squeezed a Bulb to cause air flow and a measurement on a manometer the operator read and then manually logged the flows.

I remember that someone in the late 80's convinced the City of Baton Rouge School System to apply Bacteria in their grease traps to keep them clean. Instructions were to apply a small amount once per day to help clean the traps. What actually happened was a large overdose of bugs into the grease traps and a major catastrophe to the city collection system as they were plugging 60-inch force mains with grease. Then Director of the Baton Rouge Pretreatment Program Dr. Jack Ensminger called @C. C. Lynch & Associates, Inc. and ordered several flow pokes and had teams deployed around the city manually measuring the flows and logging it on a clip board every 15 minutes, from all of the schools.

This is where we first had the idea to pair the Flow Poke with the Isco 2870 Portable Bubbler Flow meter which they were able to deploy in the manholes and record flow rates on a strip recorder.

Since then, we have utilized this technology for numerous applications that have low flows or can't easily be measured with Area Velocity Technology.

We just installed one last week for a 30-day flow study that would be hard to measure this with any other technology.

The only trick part was climbing the ladder otherwise it was up and measuring flow and pushing to the cloud in less than 10 minutes.