It is known to be desirable to monitor the condition of various assets in agricultural industries. In one example, when grains are stored in storage bins, it is particularly desirable to monitor the heating of the contents of those bins. Grain heating in storage bins can cause spoilage of the grain, resulting in diminished quality or full spoilage of the grain. Storage and high moisture or high heat environments can degrade or completely spoil these crops. Many efforts are made by farmers to minimize this possibility, and to maximize the price of their grain by enhancing and maintaining its top quality.
Storage bins are often located in close proximity to the fields where the crops are grown. In this way the grain can be stored until transport is required to a remote handling or dispatch facility, with minimum cost and time requirements during harvest.
One of the traditional approaches to monitoring grain bin temperature conditions has been to travel to each bin and manually inspect the condition of its contents. However where bins are geographically distributed, there are excessive costs and time commitments involved in traveling to each storage bin location. As well, given the distance and time involved in such travel, often the contents of the storage bin may not be checked as frequently as they should be to guarantee optimal storage of the product.
The use of remote monitoring solutions that employ in bin sensors is known. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,293,854 to Gookins et al teaches a system in which in-bin sensors communicate bin conditions to a remote display device. However, the systems that have been created in this area to date have a significant limitation in terms of their ongoing operating costs insofar as if they use hardwired communications infrastructure to communicate with the central monitoring station this introduces a significant limitation in the locations that can be used [since hardwired communications infrastructure such as a telephone line or the like is required at that location].
While prior art systems are known that employ wireless technology to transmit grain bin conditions derived from in-bin sensors, the cost of such systems particularly in more remote locations can be prohibitive. Prior art systems teach constant sensing of bin conditions, and constant or at least periodic transmission of such data to a remote monitoring location. The result is a requirement for a substantial amount of transmission bandwidth, which can be very costly for the individual farmer or a company providing bin monitoring services, which cost can increase significantly in the case of more remote bin locations.
Although grain bins have been described as one example of a remote monitoring system, the problems associated with substantial amount of transmission bandwidth required in monitoring systems exists in general in all fields, including those beyond agriculture.
What is needed, therefore, is a method and system for remote monitoring of the conditions of an asset to be monitored that reduces the amount of bandwidth required for sensor data transmission when an alarm condition exists, so that the user can take appropriate action to deal with the alarm condition.
The many conditions which could optimally be monitored remotely using a similar method, include volume stored within an asset storage vessel, presence of pests or gas associated with a product, or other types of conditions, all of which could also be incorporated into the desired method by simply adding or modifying the nature of the condition sensors associated with the asset, and it would again be desirable over the prior art to provide a reduced bandwidth data transmission method and equipment package that could monitor these types of conditions.