• Company: Facilities Management Company
• Industry: Facilities Management
• Services: Wireless Monitoring, Server Hosting, Data Analysis
• Location: Canary Wharf, London, UK
• Cost-Saving: £10,000

The Overview

Our engineers installed a wireless monitoring system for Facilities Management Company.

The Situation

A facilities management company based in Canary Wharf, London, was seeking an asset monitoring solution to improve the reliability of their cooling towers mounted on the roof of their office block.

This large office building has a floor area of more than 100,000m2 and the cooling towers are essential as they provide ventilation and air conditioning for the 6,000 people that work inside the building.

The site’s maintenance staff wanted to permanently monitor their key assets and receive email alerts if a threshold was exceeded, making the Ronds wireless system an ideal solution.

The Challenges

The cooling towers cannot always be safely accessed by the site’s maintenance staff. Each of the towers contains motor-driven fans and pumps which have panels and guards in place to prevent access while the units are running, meaning conventional vibration monitoring was not suitable.

The Solution

A wireless monitoring solution was installed by our reliability engineers to collect real-time vibration and temperature data. The data was transmitted via 4G to our secure cloud server, where it can be viewed and analysed in the software’s online dashboard or mobile app.

The Results

The vibration level exceeded the customised threshold, and an email alert was sent to the site’s maintenance team.

The data was quickly reviewed at our Remote Data Centre by our expert analysis team who recommended immediate corrective action.

Upon inspection, it was identified that the fan bearing was not correctly secured, and the maintenance team swiftly resolved this.

A significant resultant reduction in vibration was recorded (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Vibration readings before and after corrective action

If the looseness had been allowed to progress, it is likely that the fan element would have impacted the housing which could have resulted in catastrophic damage.

It is estimated that the replacement of the fan and repairs to the mounting structure would have cost £10,000.