Adroit Partners with Hill Laboratories for Water Sensor Validation

Adroit is delighted to be working with Hill Laboratories to independently verify data from Adroit environmental monitoring solutions across New Zealand conditions.
Hill Laboratories for Water Sensor Validation
Adroit has spent the past two years developing unique capabilities in environmental monitoring, including real-time water quality testing and is now considered to be a leading provider in the field.

But while Adroit’s sensors are supplied by the world leaders in this technology, Adroit management considered it essential to verify their results against grab samples tested in laboratories in order to demonstrate accuracy and to build confidence in real-time in-field monitoring technology.

Adroit CEO Blair Stewart says; “Hill Laboratories has an enviable reputation for accuracy and reliability, being the trusted provider of environmental monitoring services throughout the country.”

We’re pleased to say that our team was able to work with Hill Laboratories on a bench-top investigation within their laboratory to verify that our sensors and systems can generate data that falls within an acceptable range of accuracy.
Blair Stewart

CEO, Adroit

Grab testing, an approach that sees samples captured by hand and taken to a laboratory for analysis is considered the ‘gold standard’ in New Zealand for water quality testing of surface water, such as rivers, lakes and streams and seawater.
environmental monitoring using electronic sensors

While the advantage of grab testing is its very high degree of accuracy, its disadvantage is that a physical sample needs to be taken and the laboratory might be quite a distance away, therefore sample collection is periodic: weekly, monthly, or six monthly, and usually during work hours.

In contrast, real-time environmental monitoring using electronic sensors has significant advantages, being able to report measurement data at all times of day or night and all kinds of weather conditions. Adroit’s strategy is to use the best equipment available throughout the world, including S::can sensors out of Austria for Nitrates, and US company In-Situ across a wide range of parameters.

Hill Laboratories CEO, Jonno Hill says that the company was excited to work with Adroit.

Adroit is a leader the way in the application of new environmental monitoring technology and it was interesting to be able to compare their results with our lab testing

Jonno Hill

CEO, Hill Laboratories

“It provides further evidence of the potential to use real-time sensors more broadly in the area of water quality monitoring, as well as to identify how traditional lab testing and real-time monitoring can work together to help improve the New Zealand environment,” he said.

As part of the testing process, Adroit worked with Hill Laboratories technicians, who retrieved 21 samples of water from short-term storage which had been recently tested. The samples had been collected from a range of North Island and South Island sites, covering a range of water types. Results for a number of parameters were measured using the Adroit sensors which had been set up in the laboratory. All laboratory testing was carried out by Hills Laboratory staff and done completely independently from Adroit.

“10 years ago, to achieve the standard of lab testing in real-time equipment was very difficult. But over the last few years, equipment has reached the standard where it is possible to have regular results coming in that are accurate, reliable and affordable,” Stewart says.

“What this initial laboratory-based verification does is provide some early reassurance for our clients to give them the confidence to move forward with some large-scale monitoring projects, which is extremely exciting for Adroit, but also extremely exciting for a lot of the positive environmental work that’s being done around the country,” Stewart said.

“So, it’s great news for not just us and our clients, but all New Zealanders,” he said.

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