Business Opportunity
A successful commercial plumbing firm that specializes in the high-rise residential space wanted to add real-time monitoring and automated remote control of the plumbing to their clients’ buildings.
Technical Challenge
By the time they engaged with ObjectSpectrum, they had already tried two other solutions: a single-family residential product that wasn’t scalable and a system using proprietary radio technology that wasn’t reliable or secure enough for commercial use. The solution that we created had to be secure, reliable, and scalable. The client had already picked out the valve actuators they wanted to use, so we started from there. The challenge was to design a system using existing “off-the-shelf” components to keep costs low and speed the solution’s time-to-market.
Solution
We integrated their selected valves and actuators with commercially available gateways and control nodes, and two different kinds of leak sensors, all using low-power wireless technology from four different vendors (this kind of multi-vendor interoperability is one of the strengths of the Prism software). There are two different kinds of control nodes, and both have rechargeable batteries for backup during a power outage, while strip and rope sensors used to detect leaks have long-life (5+ year) primary batteries. And all are monitored to be sure they are holding power and functioning correctly. The water valves can be individually controlled from one of two phone- or web-based applications we developed (a simplified one for residents and a more complex one for the building management), from emergency shut-off buttons mounted on the wall, or automatically if a leak is detected.
Impact
Their clients love that their damage events and insurance claims have dropped to near zero, while it also drastically cuts down repair time, saving everyone money. The result was spun off into a separate company called MEPGUARD which offers this solution to commercial plumbers nationwide.