The City
of Susanville has an existing control system that proprietary. This
equipment is starting to come to the end of its life cycle as well. When the
City goes to the Vendor for new equipment the price is over inflated, but to
be compatible with their existing equipment they must pay the asking price.
The City could not afford to replace the whole system outright in one shot.
Sunrise has designed a natural gas system and improvements to the water
system for the City. We told them we could possibly help them with their
problem. We took parts of their existing equipment and preformed some bench
top trials to see what would be done. We discovered that the equipment could
be reconfigured to ‘talk’ Modus instead of the proprietary protocol it was
using. This would now allow other equipment to be used within the system.
Its Sunrise’s philosophy that we want to retain clients based on our service
and innovative ideas, not because they are locked into using us because we
are the only ones who can service them.
The City was also tried of paying the month connection costs associated with
the lease lines they have to every site. The new sites added have been
installed with a VHF radio connection back to the Master Unit.
Another problem facing the City was that the coding language used in the
equipment was too cryptic and difficult for most integrators to be
interested in working with it. But the City’s system was growing and how the
system now needed to work was different. We installed a new Master
Controller (SCADAPack 32P) that had enough communications ports to talk to
both the lease line site as well as the newer radio polled sites. It spoke
Modbus and used standard Ladder Logic programming as well as the new IEC
Suite of standard programming languages. Now any integrator could come in
and change the system as the city desired. We rewrote the control code in
this new Master Unit and turned the proprietary equipment into basically
remote I/O. The master unit would do all the thinking and receive status and
transmit outputs to the remote units. As the older equipment fails new
non-proprietary equipment will be installed and pertinent processing given
back to the remote site.
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