In the mountains north of Quito, Ecuador, clean water is an abundant natural resource, but it also presents civic challenges. While the region’s subterranean rivers provide a plentiful water source, delivering safe, treated water across rugged terrain to a fast-growing population requires more than pipelines and pumps. It requires control, visibility, and resilience.
The Pesillo water treatment plant in Ecuador, set against the Andes mountains, has solar arrays to support sustainable operations.
Pesillo Imbabura
Local leaders in Northern Ecuador envisioned a new regional water treatment plant in Pesillo Imbabura, a province in northern Ecuador. The goal was to construct a plant designed to process 700 liters of water per second and supply clean water to more than 300,000 people across five municipalities—one of the largest infrastructure projects ever undertaken in the area.
Civil construction began in 2019, led by H&H™, a large Latin American contractor with experience in dams, tunnels, and municipal works. H&H brought strong civil engineering capabilities, but the project also required a modern SCADA and automation system to manage treatment operations.
For SCADA expertise, H&H looked for local specialists who understood both the technology and the needs of Ecuadorian municipalities. That search led them to Next Control™, a Quito-based system integrator founded by José Estrada. With a background in automation and years of experience supporting infrastructure projects in the region, Estrada and his team were well positioned to take on the challenge.
Who is Next Control?
Automation engineer José Estrada founded Next Control, an IoT-certified OptoPartner, in 2018 after nearly three decades in the field. He drew on that experience and a focus on practical, cost-effective solutions to show the company as a strong fit for a project that demanded reliability on a limited budget.
“The municipalities needed a system they could count on for decades,” Estrada recalls. “It had to be reliable in the mountains, simple for operators, and resilient to communications outages. That’s what we designed.”
The Challenge: A Brand New Plant
Next Control joined the Pesillo Imbabura project in 2019 after crews had begun building the plant, but no one had defined a control or monitoring strategy. Without SCADA, operators would have no centralized visibility, no historical data, and no alarms to warn of faults. The municipalities also had to coordinate distribution across five independent service areas, each with different daily and seasonal demands.
Estrada’s team considered several automation systems, but expensive software licenses and locked hardware platforms made them a poor fit for a municipal system that needed flexibility and affordable operation.
A geographic view of the SCADA system linking water treatment and distribution sites across Ecuador.
Choosing the Right Platform
Next Control proposed a different path. Estrada had worked with Opto 22 since the 1990s and trusted the company for reliable, cost-effective water projects.
For Pesillo Imbabura, he recommended using Opto 22’s
groov EPIC (
Edge
Programmable
Industrial
Controller) and
groov RIO (IIoT-enabled remote I/O modules)—modern platforms that handle control, monitoring, and data integration without locking customers into specific protocols or a proprietary ecosystem.
Next Control designed a two-layer system:
- At the treatment plant, two groov EPIC controllers handled centralized control with redundancy.
- Across the distribution network, 36 groov RIO modules measured flows, controlled valves, and logged data locally.
“The EPICs gave us reliable control at the core,” Estrada says. “And with RIOs in the field, each site could keep running even if communications went down.”
Network architecture of the treatment plant using groov EPIC, groov RIO, and groov View for control and monitoring
Using Free Tools
Estrada’s team reviewed several software options, but the municipalities had little budget for additional software costs. A custom .NET system was possible, but stakeholders wanted something standardized and easier to maintain.
Thankfully,
groov EPIC works with the Opto 22
PAC Project suite, a free software set with tools including:
Next Control also used the Opto 22 free
.NET SDK to integrate video feeds and reports directly into the operator interface, and configured local MariaDB® databases at remote sites via shell access. Together, these free tools gave the plant supervisory control, operator visibility, and historical data logging—everything needed for a SCADA system—without additional license costs.
A PAC Display interface with an integrated live camera feed for alum sulfate dosing at the Pesillo water treatment plant