Mulch is a combustible material. Adding mulch properly in your landscapes provides many benefits to water retention, soil temperature, weed inhibition, and soil erosion. Aesthetically, the natural, fresh, dark color creates contrast, which enhances the overall perception of your landscape greenery. However, every coin has two sides. In this case…like when your mulch catches on fire! Mulch fire can be easily ignited by spontaneously combusting or by irresponsible smokers. The real risk is that a small outdoor mulch fire can quickly spread to structured buildings and cause a big disaster.
Challenges
A mulch fire can be underway before someone notices or is alerted by smoke alarms or sprinkler systems activating. Care must be taken to prevent mulch fires. But the existing mulch/compost fires detection system poses challenges for fire companies:
- Alarm Delays in time-sensitive environments
Delays caused by confusing fire alarm system information or ineffective communication systems can have a ripple effect on other aspects of the operation.
- Ineffective-cost deployments
There are four major components in this detection system and they are sensors, gateways (either carrier-grade or private), internet servers (either developed by customers or Milesight IoT Cloud), and the end-users like the fire department or municipal staff. A star network topology is adopted in the connection between sensors and gateways.
Many temperature sensors are distributed on the mulch beds and are connected to the gateways for sending data to the internet servers. If the city-wide LoRaWAN® network or the open community LoRaWAN® network is available from local telegram providers, then end-users can quickly and easily connect the LoRaWAN® based temperature sensors to the existing infrastructure as city IoT devices to better regulate public landscapes.
LoRa technology provides a wide range of flexibility for the distribution and deployment of sensors. After collecting data, gateways push the data to the Internet by MQTT communication protocol through the cellular network. Data is then stored on the internet and is visualized in an online dashboard. Also, the internet server (application server) issues alarms to end-users through the gateway instantly if they determine mulch fire occurs somewhere.
The Milesight EM500-PT100 Temperature Sensor is an ideal solution for monitoring and transmitting real-time soil temperature data of public mulch beds. The sensor works out-of-the-box with up to 10 years of battery life for easy maintenance. Ensure your mulch and organic mass piles have optimal conditions to protect against potential fires!
Other Applications- Commercial Mulch
- Compost and Biomass Storage
- Precision Agriculture
- Hydroponics and Smart Greenhouses
LoRa supports up to several kilometers, in a low cost and power consumption manner.
Integrated measurement & alarmThe solution can integrate temperature data and alarms into a variety of external monitoring and control systems to activate smoke and sprinkler systems.
