Sonar Flow Meters

It depends on the fluid.

• Magnetic flowmeters cannot be used on anything that is non-conductive.
• Ultrasonic flowmeters are suitable for non-invasive, temporary and permanent applications and sometimes make good random number generators in those applications.

They work fine if they give you the complete directions. 6 months ago I would have said they are junk. We installed our first one in September and it never worked. Despite many calls to the manufacturers help line we could never get a stable signal from their directives and tests, so they replaced the unit and we had to ship the system before the new unit was tested. Customer had the same problem with the new unit until someone who had used one of these told them to install some grease under the transducer - there are no notes about this anywhere in the literature that came with this system. Grease was included with the transducer, but being on a sanitary system, we by-passed that since no notes or directions were included to tell us what to do with the stuff. (yeah - a bit of a dumb move on our part - should have been intuitive) Customer reports the flow meter is doing fine now. Certainly cheaper than a mag unit (which would not have worked in this application) and very cheap compared to a coriolis model.