System Integration: Water/Wastewater
This $2 million+ project involves the design, assembly, configuration, and installation of a SCADA system to monitor and control 51 critical wastewater lift and booster stations serving the municipality's 412,000 residents, located within a 20-mile by 20-mile service area.
Read about the project. To read prior 2005-06 entrees click here.
2 Down, 1 To Go
This past month we ordered material needed for the bubbler required for the last emergency retrofit station. Primarily we have been focused upon SCADA side re-condifguration required to communicate with each station. The cell service provider dragged their feet on setting up new accounts beyond 2 months - unreasonable to say the least. As long as this project has dragged on, the ...... Read More
Comments (0)Another Emergency Retrofit Completed
Well, the weather dried up and the next station installed without much issue. One of the drives had something happen to it that caused a loop issue with the new PLC - would cause it to spike intermittently to a very high level, making the whole system unusable. It took us a few hours to trace this to the drive. Attempted to repair the drive by switching parts from adjacent similar driv ...... Read More
Comments (0)2010 starting off a good year
Wow - lot’s of muni job requests to respond to the first week of this year. If we were successful with them all, we could stop the sales effort in January. The odds were good on a number of the jobs, but it would be rare to get 100% - that would probably mean we weren’t charging enough to cover our real costs. The weather has dried up from the soggy December we experienc ...... Read More
Comments (1)Too much rain and another contract expires....
Well, the weather hasn’t cooperated with the next emergency retrofit. We went out to the station and found all pumps running at capacity and the level exceeding the high setpoint. We have had LOTS of rain the past week, and it is continuing this weekend. The system suffers from infiltration of storm water into the waste water system. Not a good time to be doing conversions that ...... Read More
Comments (0)Climbed the Curve
We’ve got a week off from the rush job that we had to devote our attention to this past month, so we are scheduling the next emergency install for the week after Thanksgiving. Our engineer has climbed the learning curve I first climbed 15 years ago with the RTU’s challenging programming language. No online monitoring / debugging capability and a programming tool so basic it doesn&#x ...... Read More
Comments (0)A Busy Time
We are grateful that our client has been flexible with us the past few weeks as we deal with a time consuming rush request for another client. Our new engineer has about climbed the learning curve on programming in the specialized statement language used by the RTUs. We’ll schedule the next emergency retrofit startup for the following week. We are also grateful the hurricane passed us ...... Read More
Comments (0)Thankful for Emergency Retrofits
The first of three emergency pump station retrofits was completed about 4 weeks ago, just before I departed for a startup in Singapore. The usual number of startup problems were encountered. These were mostly mis-landed and mis-marked wires along with un-documented changes. We eventually picked through everything wire by wire, marking on our prints as went along to arrive at a complet ...... Read More
Comments (0)Patience is a Virtue
Emergency retrofits progressing as normal. RTU units arrived here in our shop from City and we are about to schedule the first installation, now that engineering has been completed. Time to break in a new engineer, so this could take alittle extra time. Been a really dry August, so still no rain to allow witness testing of the software changes made at the booster pump stations. It appe ...... Read More
Comments (0)On to Emergency Retrofits
Well, we got word yesterday that the new RTUs have shipped and arrived at the City. All that is left is for them to get them to our facility. Our engineering folks are making final plans for installation of the first site. The goal is to complete in the next 60 days all three sites. Recall these were initially requisitioned June to October 2008. While the booster pump stat ...... Read More
Comments (0)Finally some Rain
It’s hard to verify the operation of a program if you can never put it through a full test of it’s functions. Such has been the case with the requested changes to the booster pump station control programs. After several months of waiting it finally came - a significant rain event that would cause the station to pump at 100% capacity. Not at a convenient time of course - S ...... Read More
Comments (0)Booster Pump Station Mods Near Completion
Almost a year ago we began a small add-on contract to modify the control programs at two of the most critical booster pump stations. Modifications were necessary to work toward obtaining full capacity from the stations. Due to loss of a few 400HP 514RPM variable speed- driven pump impellers, the City had reduced the maximum speed of the VFDs to 80 percent. These stations had be ...... Read More
Comments (1)E-Request Planning and Engineering
Project planning and detail engineering phases are underway for processing the emergency retrofit requests. One of the sites is somewhat special - a double station site that needs some mechanical as well as electrical work to implement a bubbler system. Visited site, took photos and measurements. Working to keep components, layout, “look and feel” same as previous installations. ...... Read More
Comments (2)
