Most people in the water and wastewater industry know that under the same standard conditions, the electrical current used by equipment is a reflection of its condition.
Industrial electricians know how important it is to monitor the current drawn from each phase of a motor from time to time and compare them between each other and to previous historical data. The problem resides in the fact that most of maintenance personnel do not have the right equipment and if they do, they may not have the required training.
Most everyone in the water and wastewater industry knows how preventive maintenance saves tremendous amounts of money every year. Proactive maintenance should be the very next step in saving even more money. The problem with an efficient proactive maintenance program is that specialized equipment must be installed and used by highly trained personnel.
A question that is often asked in the water and wastewater industry is: How is it possible to implement proactive maintenance without busting the operation budget the first year?
One solution may be the MerMAID (Motor Event and current Recorder) system, a multi-phase, multi-motor/motor digital event based current and frequency recorder system, with external event logging. The recorder offers Palm-based computer graphic analysis with automatic anomaly search algorithms makes it easy to find impending problems while onsite as well as a Windows application offers even deeper data analysis.
Additonally, nine current clamps, an analog input, a pulse input and 3 digital inputs can all be connected to MerMAID’s datalogger at the same time and operate up to six months on two "C" batteries filling its 500,000 record memory.
A MerMAID Kit offering two motors/pumps includes a datalogger, six current clamps, an AC power supply, two industrial alkaline "C" type batteries, accessories and Palm and Windows’ software.
To find out how to test this $2,600 kit for three months for only $150 a month, visit MAIDLabs, Inc., at the AWWA ACE Booth #636.
Source: SGC