In Summary: Historically, enterprises with sophisticated water treatment systems have had to balance costly technician site visits against the danger and expense of delayed response to system changes. Now emWare and LMI have minimized the need for on-site visits by adding remote management capabilities to LMI's controller devices, along with the capability to page technicians when unsatisfactory conditions trigger an alarm.

The Players

LMI, a leading manufacturer of chemical metering pumps, controllers, and accessories at ISO 9001 facilities, wanted a simple, rapid method for alerting water treatment technicians to crucial system alarms.

emWare provided LMI with a fast, easy, and affordable remote device management solution based on its EMIT® software for adding remote management capabilities to new and legacy devices and device networks.

Key Technologies Used

LMI offers this remote monitoring and alert communications capability on its Liquitron DC5500 series of controllers.

emMicro®, emWare's device object server software, communicates with LMI's subnet router, LiquiComm™ Remote Communications Module, using DataComm™ post-processing software. emWare's emGateway®, a software bridging and network management application that runs on a PC or singleboard computer, provides connectivity to a high-speed network, such as the Internet or other wide area network.

emMicro and emGateway are part of emWare's Embedded Micro Internetworking Technology (EMIT®) infrastructure. With EMIT software, device manufacturers can network-enable their products to offer improved service, convenience, cost savings, and productivity for their customers. A water treatment technician can receive real-time information on a personal digital assistant (PDA), PC, laptop, pager, or via email.

The Bottom Line

LMI products help maintain the water quality in water treatment applications for commercial, industrial, and agricultural use. When water conditions fall outside acceptable parameters, technicians need to respond swiftly.

Using emWare's technology, LMI's Liquitron DC5500 series of controllers allows technicians to remotely manage multiple cooling tower operations, access real-time system data, and remotely or locally download up to a month's worth of historical data via PC, laptop or Palm Pilot.

Remote and immediate access to system data is allowing LMI customers to respond more quickly to system problems and eliminate unnecessary on-site service trips, which saves service support costs and frees service reps to sell into new accounts.

The Story Behind the Bottom Line

We usually associate water treatment with household and agricultural uses -- irrigation and drinking water. But water also plays a critical role in climate control of buildings, as well as in manufacturing raw materials and finished goods. Many processing systems use water that must be kept within precisely balanced parameters.

LMI provides the vital controllers, such as the Liquitron DC5500, that monitor water condition, ensuring that it falls within acceptable parameters, and when necessary, pump the correct chemicals into the water tanks to maintain the critical balance. LMI Liquitron controllers must continuously analyze water used in HVAC cooling towers and direct electronic metering pumps to add precise amounts of chemicals to prevent the formation of rust, scaling, and bacteria.

These delicate machines generate alerts and alarms when they require an adjustment -- for example, when a pump goes off-line. Having water treatment specialists physically visit every controller frequently to check for these alerts can cause maintenance costs to soar; on the other hand, if the technician only visits the system once a week, a situation that might originally have required only a minor adjustment could escalate into a critical and expensive maintenance problem.

Until now, enterprises had to balance the cost of technician site visits against the danger and expense of a delayed response to system changes. Working together, emWare and LMI have eliminated unnecessary service visits and improved service response time by adding remote management capabilities to LMI's cooling tower controllers. Remote controller management offers technicians real-time information such as conductivity, temperature, and alarms that can be read from any or all customer sites. The controllers also have the capability to page or email technicians when unsatisfactory conditions trigger an alarm.

LMI's Liquitron DC5500 series of controllers contain emWare's emMicro software, which provides the intelligence necessary to communicate with other devices. Using a modem, up to 31 controllers can communicate through emWare's emGateway™, which transmits the data to a high-speed network, such as the Internet or other wide area network. Operators can arrange for either automatic or on-demand data downloads. With emMicro, water treatment specialists can plug a computer or personal digital assistant into a serial port on the Liquitron controller and download up to a month's worth of the monitoring data the unit has collected. Using a client application, which emWare helped LMI develop, technicians can plot data to watch for trends and anomalies.

Thanks to its collaboration with emWare, LMI has ensured that its customers can receive and read alarms and real-time information at any of their sites. Downloading this data helps users troubleshoot any existing problems; technicians can handle many problems remotely and minimize the number of site visits that they had previously made to read tank levels, verify conductivity, and check for alarms. They can respond more quickly, diagnose problems more completely, and stay on top of their systems' performance 24 hours a day.

Since LMI's users can monitor their systems more easily and conveniently, water quality is more consistent. LMI will even detect the bacteria that cause Legionnaire's Disease, which killed 25 American Legion conventioneers in 1976. And users are seeing an additional benefit: by accessing and monitoring their devices remotely, they can minimize the need for costly field equipment inspections. Thus, emWare's solutions are providing LMI and their customers with the technology they need to improve service, enhance performance, and increase profitability.