Remote pump monitoring with Peerless Pump
Iain Hoey
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Travis Montembeault, Director for FireConnect Digital Innovation Business at Peerless Pump Company, introduces the remote pump monitoring solution
Could you introduce us to Peerless Pump’s latest product offering?
FireConnect – in the spirit of Peerless innovation, we have developed the worlds most robust and First and Only FM Approved pump remote monitoring solution.
How does this fit into Peerless Pump’s existing portfolio?
It is a great additional bolt-on to existing fire pump systems, both for Peerless and other OEMs.
Customers are finding value all throughout the solution but some of the biggest value props that I’ve heard from voice of the customer include leak detection through monitoring jockey pump usage and diagnosing problems before dispatching service trucks – i.e.
controller failures, water supply issues – what is a common trouble alarm?
Customers also value that it can manage fuel level across multiple sites for diesel driven fire pump systems; Incident Command – pump performance during a fire scenario, it can understand fire spread through pump performance, providing compliance with mandated weekly/monthly fire pump churn tests, and it ensures a fire pump controller has been returned to “Auto Mode” following routine service.
How does this product address current challenges or gaps in the fire protection industry?
Our industry struggles from a people problem.
By that I mean we can’t get enough people to inspect and service every fire pump installation out there.
We know that pumps are not being tested at the routine intervals they should be and are not being replaced quickly either.
We saw this especially during COVID when staff couldn’t get into buildings for extended periods of time.
Data visibility via remote monitoring achieves several things to help address reliability and improve performance.
It makes compliance abundantly obvious to all those that need this information.
It helps catch issues and failures that occur in between the routine NFPA 25 inspection intervals so that action can be taken quicker
It also opens the door for concepts like remote testing (see FM1330) to help reduce the barrier to testing fire pumps weekly/monthly.
And Incident Command can be useful for the fire department to discuss live pump performance as sprinkler heads are open without having to send someone into the pump room to assess the situation.
What kind of feedback have you received from users about FireConnect?
The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, particularly around our clients that navigate risk across multiple buildings with fire pumps across multiple countries.
They struggle with them same personnel issues that most in the industry do – keeping good people who know the way things work.
The good news is, with a system like FireConnect the data and history stays consistent even as people come and go allowing for continuity.
Regarding feedback for innovation – we’re constantly assessing our product offering for iterative and paradigm shift developments, especially based on feedback from our existing and potential clients.
As discussed the first product offering started out as a vision in conjuncture with a corporate partner with a very specific need.
Over time we’ve adapted the solution to fit a broader segment of the market, including releasing reduced functionality models to serve older installations that don’t have the most recent vintage equipment, but still want to monitor their systems remotely.
The best part of working in this space is the ability to be agile.
Over a weekend, based on feedback from a potential client, we were able to launch functionality for monitoring live fuel level in diesel fuel tanks (not just an alarm) along with simplifying pump test reporting to adhere to California diesel emissions reporting.
The future is limitless and I’m excited that we’re just beginning to scratch the surface.
