Electricity + Control November 2019

Product News

ENERGY MANAGEMENT + ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING

The power of remote monitoring As Eskom’s most recent round of load shedding confirmed, South Africa is an increasingly energy-uncertain country. With the national utility facing daunting financial and technical challenges, electricity users can no longer bank on uninterrupted national supply. For businesses and facilities where uptime is critical, such as data centres, factories, construction companies, mines and telecoms providers, alternative solutions are needed. Master Power Technologies (MPT) supplies backup power solutions that ensure uptime and good quality power that will not compromise critical equipment. The company’s mostly turnkey solutions include uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs), generator sets, fuel systems, battery and energy management processes. However, even the best backup power solutions are not infallible. In response to this, MPT has developed a comprehensive automated remote monitoring capability. Rory Reid, Sales and Marketing Director at MPT, says, “The Master Power Universal Controller (UC) is at the heart of our remote monitoring system. Conceived and developed by our in-house R&D team, the UC is a range of application-specific hardware and software that controls and monitors all components of our backup power solutions. “The UC provides real-time hardware and software monitoring and internal intelligent automatic action to mitigate potentially critical issues that could cripple essential functions. The MPT team of experienced and skilled technical experts monitors customer systems from our 24/7/365 network operating centre, and site assistance is deployed before a situation reaches critical points. For breakdown support or routine maintenance, our response time is excellent. We also have the advantage that we own and operate workshops that keep stock of frequently used spares.” With the UC as a backbone, MPT has developed several product applications to improve and expand its remote monitoring capability. Triple change-over controls consist of multiple devices or boards which are connected to form a system that controls the source selection of an electrical system, such as power-metering, switching breakers with and without interlocks, reading breaker status and generator management. The main function of the triple change-over is to select and then operate any of the three sources connected to it in order to provide power to the site. It is a standardised control tool for power management in data centres and power-critical sites. Base transceiver station (BTS) NewLife remote monitoring is a desktop and mobile phone app that remotely monitors sites and generates equipment reports. The sophisticated generator controller’s technology actively monitors electrical equipment to ensure it is operating at optimal capacity, and to pre-empt any problems. It also allows the remote starting and stopping of equipment. It is used in high-resilience installations where uptime is critical. MPT’s remote management system monitors all alarms and the condition or status of secure power equipment in critical areas such as data centres. This includes environmental

monitoring – humidity, temperature, intrusion detection and CCTV monitoring. Every UPS is only as reliable as the batteries providing the backup power; hence, companies must ensure that their batteries are functioning optimally at all times. BattSure is a battery manager that provides customers with surety of site performance according to design specifications. The technology protects a site by monitoring the safe and correct operation of its batteries, which is vital for uninterrupted power supply. Designed to monitor the status of UPS batteries continually, BattSure sounds a warning as soon as one or more batteries show signs of a fault, before they can damage other cells in the UPS. BattSure monitors the string current, voltage and temperature of each battery to determine the state of charge, state of health, and alarm conditions according to standard IEC-62060. When the UC detects an issue – anything from a mains failure to a battery failure in a UPS installation – it raises an alarm. In response, the operators at the remote monitoring centre follow standard operating procedures to deal with the issue. As the UC monitors the situation in real time, a log is kept of the performance of all electronic equipment under observation. This provides customers with a clear understanding of the status and performance of their systems. In addition to improving availability, reliability and uptime, MPT’s remote monitoring capability helps maintain optimal operational costs by reporting on any deviations in the efficiency matrices. “The high number of clients we monitor via our network operating centre is testimony to the value that the remote monitoring system provides to the overall data centre solutions that we offer,” says Reid. For more information contact Master Power Technologies. Visit www.kva.co.za

BattSure is a battery management system developed to monitor the operation of UPS batteries, to ensure consistent backup power or raise an alarm when battery faults are indicated.

34 Electricity + Control

NOVEMBER 2019