Fuel Monitoring System in Morbi: Tank Readings for Tile Trucks and Port Trailers

BearTech gives an accuracy of about 95% on a sound tank after proper fitting and calibration. For a dispatch desk that wants to know when a truck was filled and whether its level fell unexpectedly, that is ample. It is still a working figure and not a laboratory one, and it will not match a pump meter to the last litre. Small gaps between slip and graph are ordinary.

Some of the margin comes from the tank. Tile trucks and trailers do heavy work, and their tanks may carry dents or rust inside; water or sludge in the diesel also changes what the probe senses. Some comes from movement. Heavy tile loads mean firm braking on the highway, and trailers stand on uneven ground at port yards and at the salt-pan edge near Maliya. Diesel tilts and sloshes, and the line wobbles. That wobble is motion, not loss.

So judge refills and losses using readings taken while the vehicle stands on level ground, before and after the event. A truck parked flat in the factory yard gives a reliable figure; a trailer leaning in a port queue may not. Read the trend across several hours rather than one spike, and keep the ground in mind before calling a driver at midnight.

Network adds a limit too. Readings travel over Airtel, and on long stretches towards the Rann or in pockets on village roads the live view may pause and catch up later. A blank on the graph means no signal, not missing diesel. Most important of all, the system only reports and alerts. It cannot lock a tank, stop an engine or prevent anyone drawing diesel out.

A point worth settling first: the sensor goes into the diesel tank of whatever has an engine. On a container rig, that is the prime mover, not the trailer or the box it carries. With that clear, the choice is simple, because Omnicomm LLS-AF 4, Mercetech and Mielta Fantom all cost ₹19,999 in the package. Look at where the tank sits relative to the cab, its material, and whether you would rather avoid a sensor battery or a long cable.

Omnicomm is wired. It takes power from the vehicle and passes its reading by cable to the tracker, inside a sealed body that copes with dust, heat and washing. For tile trucks and prime movers on long highway runs, which a Morbi factory may keep for many years, having no battery inside any sensor across the fleet is a real convenience. Its probe can be cut for the deep tanks typical of heavy trucks.

Mercetech and Mielta Fantom both use Bluetooth. Mercetech suits a clay carrier or delivery vehicle with a tank set far back, where a cable would be long and exposed. Mielta Fantom adds Bluetooth 5.0, a tilt reading and a steel flange made for steel or plastic tanks, and is configured through Mielta's phone app. For a worker bus with a plastic tank, Fantom is the natural one to discuss.

Batteries inside both wireless sensors wear down with time and are treated as consumables outside the warranty. BearTech confirms the final model and probe length after seeing the tank, and may supply a comparable model if the listed one is out of stock. A Morbi fleet can carry wired sensors on trucks and wireless ones on buses, all within one Trakzee Premium account.

It begins at the tank. On fitting day the executive opens a small hole in the upper face of the truck's diesel tank and lowers a probe cut so its tip sits just above the floor, then fixes and seals it. The probe has no float; it senses how much of its length is in diesel, and its reading changes smoothly as the truck burns fuel on the highway or takes on more at a pump.

From the probe, the figure travels to the Teltonika FMB920 in the cab, along a cable for Omnicomm or over Bluetooth for Mercetech and Mielta Fantom. The tracker already knows the truck's position, speed and ignition state. It joins the diesel figure to those facts and sends the bundle out over its Airtel data SIM, so every reading arrives with the time and place it was taken, whether in Morbi or hundreds of kilometres north.

At the dispatch desk, Trakzee Premium shows the truck on a map with litres in its tank. A graph through the day shows a refill as a step up, the highway run as a smooth fall, a halt as a flat line and any sudden drop as a step down that triggers an alert. Consumption and mileage reports present the same record per trip, day or month on screen.

Calibration makes those litres real. During fitting, the probe's readings are matched against known quantities in that particular tank. Heavy trucks sometimes have tanks repaired or replaced; when that happens, or if the probe is removed, calibration must be repeated. Inform BearTech before such work and the figures stay dependable.

A fuel monitoring system fits Morbi because the district's economy moves almost entirely by diesel. Morbi stands on the Machhu river in Saurashtra, with Rajkot to the south-east, Surendranagar to the north-east, Jamnagar to the south-west and Kutch across the Little Rann to the north-west. The district, formed from Rajkot in 2013, takes in Wankaner, Tankara, Halvad and Maliya as well as the main town.

Ceramics define the traffic. Wall and floor tiles and sanitaryware leave the factories by the truckload for dealers across Gujarat and beyond, usually on long night runs. Export loads travel by container on the road through Maliya towards Samakhiali and Gandhidham, for Kandla and Mundra, where trailers wait at port gates. A single factory may keep many vehicles busy at once, each filling at different pumps on different routes.

Inbound traffic is just as steady. Clay and other raw materials arrive by bulk carrier and trailer from other districts, queuing at unloading bays. Worker buses run before dawn and after dusk, collecting shifts from villages around Morbi, Halvad and Wankaner. Maliya, at the edge of the Rann, is known for salt pans, and Wankaner has a rail link towards Rajkot, but nearly all of the cluster's freight moves by road. Each of those trips starts and ends with a tank nobody at the factory can see.

The calendar shifts the pattern. Dispatches rise before the festive and wedding season, many units pause around Diwali, and monsoon rain slows highways and lengthens port queues. With so many vehicles on so many lanes, one dated record of litres, refills and sudden drops per vehicle lets a factory compare each truck with its own past month rather than with a guess.

In a Morbi ceramic unit, three groups care about diesel. The owner watches costs across the whole fleet, the dispatch desk plans which truck goes where and when, and accounts pay the pumps and transporters. Trakzee Premium lets the main account holder create extra users, each with a separate login, so all three work from the same record without sharing a password. Tell us at ordering who should have which login.

The owner reads exceptions. A short look each morning at alerts, refills and consumption per vehicle shows which truck used more than usual per kilometre, or whose level fell during a night halt. That becomes a precise question with a time and a place, passed to dispatch for an answer, instead of a general complaint that the diesel bill is too high.

The dispatch desk reads diesel alongside movement. Before a truck leaves at dusk, its level shows whether it needs filling first. During the run, trip and halt reports beside the graph show where it stopped and for how long. For port trailers, the same screen shows how many litres each gate wait consumed, useful when discussing turnaround with the transporter or the port side. It also shows which trucks need filling before the evening dispatch.

Accounts reconcile. Each refill carries a date, a time and a rise in litres, ready to be matched with pump slips and diesel advances. Litres and kilometres per vehicle feed freight costing for each lane. When everyone reads one record, arguments about whose figure is right become rare, and the conversation moves to what should change on which lane.