Fault and alert handling
Through the use of the company’s Telstar control systems, Star Refrigeration is able to record every fault and alert occurring on our customer’s refrigeration plants. This means our customers are safe in the knowledge that their systems are being constantly monitored and that issues can be addressed immediately should the unexpected happen.
Every fault or alert email is received by a specialist team at Star’s head office Monitoring Hub and is processed by our specialist Sentinel server. This involves logging receipt of the email and sending a voice message to the local Star Service branch or on-call engineer describing the location and nature of the fault. The voice message must be acknowledged by the recipient to ensure it has been received. The branch office or engineer then investigate the problem by connecting remotely to the site HMI (Human Machine Interface) and/or visiting site if necessary.
A robust escalation procedure ensures that the fault/alert is answered (by any one of up-to 5 different personnel), otherwise, a Sentinel ‘watchdog’ alert is sent to a designated employee whose responsibility it is to notify the highest level of personnel (24/7).
Communication between Sentinel and every site is tested automatically at least every 2 hours. If site communications fail then the branch office or standby engineer are notified.
Monitoring and live analysis
Not all faults/alerts are easily diagnosed and therefore live data logging (at a relatively high frequency of a few seconds) and graphing of data, enables engineers to investigate difficult faults/alerts more quickly than fault finding on site after the fact.
Reports are then produced, covering a period of a month, which show a breakdown of faults and alerts with corroborative evidence from graphing.
Live data is stored for two years. This enables trending of data to show how efficiently (or inefficiently) each plant is working. Such trends can also show evidence of faults that may be about to occur, in which case measures are taken to stop them from ever happening.
Trending of seasonal changes in relation to power consumption and temperature control are also available.