Just-measure helps provide clean drinking water!
In 2018, I founded Just-measure ApS with the aim of making online measurements in water and sending data using the new Low-power Wide-area IoT technologies, which I myself had helped to bring to market in Denmark (SIGFOX and the operator IoT Denmark A/S). I am currently the only owner of the Just-measure ApS but has had meetings with interested potential investor.
The pain I solve is measuring pollution in drinking water done by nutrients which becomes to Nitrate which can lead to colorektal cancer (Espejo-Herrera et al., 2016), which is why utilities are obliged to monitor the concentration of nitrate and ensure that our drinking water does not exceed the nitrate limit of 50 mg/l. If this concentration is exceeded and cannot be solved in any other way, the well must be closed. In DK more than 230 drinking water wells have already been closed as a consequence of too high a nitrate content, and with an establishment price of 0.5-5 million kroner per. drilling, this is a high cost issue. A problem that could potentially grow, as new research suggests that health problems may arise at lower concentrations than previously thought (Schullehner et al., 2018). The limit value is therefore under pressure and can come down to half, ie. 25 mg/l. If this happens, many drinking water wells will be closed with major economic as well as supply consequences as a result.
The concentration of nitrate can vary vertically in a borehole due to differences in soil layers, and a borehole can therefore be kept in use for a longer period of time by using a number of vertical nitrate measurements to determine "filter levels" - ie. from which one can pump the water up from.
Today, sampling of level-specific water samples (manual process) is typically used to log the vertical nitrate variation in the form of a top and a bottom sample.
Solution: Just-measure provide a method: "Just-measure control - JMAR", for vertical nitrate measurements in drinking water wells. The system consists of the unit "Just-Measure Chambre -JMAC", and an online service that can receive data from JMAC. With the sensor in JMAC it will be possible to get a much better resolution of this vertical variation by the fact that it is possible to measure several center values - 6 to 8 measurements - in the borehole and not only at a top and bottom level. By analyzing in which layers there is nitrate pollution - or not - one will be able to maintain a given drilling for a number of years instead of closing and drilling new ones.