Water Management, USA

Highlights

• RipEX, RipEX2
• Water Management
• Migration Solution
• Multiple Repeaters
• Custom protocol, Modbus TCP, TCP/IP
• Opto 22 EPIC / Allen Bradley ControlLogix

Opto Solutions and sister company, Systems Integrator Perceptive Controls & Services, along with others, have recently come under the umbrella of UpT Reliability Solutions. They now combine over 135 years joint experience and expertise to provide turnkey solutions across different business sectors with a single point of contact, to manage projects from start to commissioning, saving customers time, energy, and money.

As an example of what this can offer the market, Opto Solutions and Perceptive controls have recently worked together to provide Migration Solutions to 3 separate water utility companies in the US Mid West, that provide both potage and waste water services. Within all three legacy networks, there were either obsolete radios, a continuing history of multiple communication failures, or both. In all cases, the reliability of the networks was significantly compromised. This was particularly obvious at sites linked using multiple repeaters.

Migration was performed using a parallel operation of legacy radios and RipEX, over two frequencies. All end users were amazed to see how easy RipEX is to configure and that the modem handles all security issues seamlessly and automatically! One end user commented, “Whatever the RTU, it just seems to work. It is as though the RTUs are hardwired in to the computer in the office. Really it just works – I am amazed it could be this easy!”

• In Portage, MI, the migrated network uses RACOM RipEX and contains 82 radios. The RTUs are Opto 22 EPIC CPU and communicate using a simple yet effective custom protocol developed by Opto Solutions.
• In Union Township, MI, the migrated network uses RACOM RipEX2 and contains 22 radios. The RTUs are also Opto 22 EPIC CPU but in this network, communication uses Modbus TCP protocol.
• In Plainwell, MI, the migrated network uses RACOM RipEX and contains 12 radios. In this network the RTUs are Allen Bradley ControlLogix processors and communication is via TCP/IP.

The reliability of RipEX means the end users now enjoy trouble free communication across their networks with no failures or need for constant maintenance. As Todd Reynolds, Partner at Opto Solutions has said “Not one of our 25 engineers have found fault with RipEX. It does what it says on the box and then just keeps on doing it!”