CentraLine Sea Hawk leak-detection
The leakage of water can have a devastating effect on buildings, their contents and people’s private and working lives. Apart from the actual damage, the consequential financial losses in term of business and professional activity can be long reaching and often irrecoverable.
Commercial buildings are particularly vulnerable to water leakage because of their size, business activities and lack of vigilance.
However, the destructive power of water on a building structure can be minor in comparison with the damage to its contents. Consider the impact of an uncontrolled deluge in a museum, art gallery or library.
Automatic leak detection offers a practical and cost-effective method of preventing excessive damage — particularly if it can be integrated into building-management systems to generate alarms and corrective action.
The new CentraLine Sea Hawk leak-detection system has been designed to ensure that three key elements — detection, communication and integration — are combined in a range of system applications from stand-alone to full integration with a building-management system.
Detection
Detecting leaks, by definition, requires a flexible sensing system that can cope with large areas and individual high-risk locations. The sensing system also needs to identify accurately where the leak is located.
The Sea Hawk can detect leaks in up to 3000 m of sensing cable with an accuracy of ±0.5% which is within 15 m in that length of cable. Typically with a sensing length of 100 m, a leak would be detected within 500 mm.
Leak-detection sensing cables can be configured as an ‘array’ consisting of spot detection for specific locations combined with varying lengths of sensing cables to cover large areas of general risk.
Areas of negligible risk are addressed by inserting lengths of non-sensing cable. This allows an array of sensing cable to be assembled to match the areas of general, specific and zero risk — ensuring maximum protection while minimising the use of unnecessary sensing cable.
End-of-line connectors are used at the end of the sensing array to signal to the Sea Hawk controller that the circuit is complete.
Communication
The CentraLine Sea Hawk has both standalone and networking capabilities — essential for an effective and flexible leak-detection installation.
The controller has an on-board display and coloured LEDs to provide device status, detection information (including distance to leak) and cable faults. A button is used to cycle the display and silence/reset the integral audible alarm. The set up and commissioning of the controller is via DIP switches.
The Sea Hawk can be mounted on a DIN rail or wall and requires a separate 12 to 24 V AC or 12 to 24 V DC power supply. An inbuilt relay enables remote alarming and emergency valve shut down capability.
Networking is provided by Modbus communication ports suitable for single or daisy-chained multiple controllers, which are also configured using DIP switches.
Integration
The integration of leak-detection systems in a building-management system ensures its status and alarms are available to users and maintenance providers. Open protocol of the Sea Hawk enables integration with new and existing Modbus-compatible systems.
The Sea Hawk, as its name suggests, is ideally suitable for the CentraLine Hawk AX range of integration controllers. Its multi-open-protocol capabilities provide a wide range of integration possibilities — including LON, BACnet, Modbus and MBus.
A single Hawk controller can manage up to 100 Sea Hawks, typically with a graphical display showing the location of the sensing arrays in the building. Alarm messaging and automatic shutdown regimes instigated in the event of a water leak.
In large or asset-sensitive buildings, the leak-detection systems can be displayed on a separate touch-screen showing the complete sensing array network, alarms and the location of any leak. This approach ensures an immediate focus on water leaks and rapid reaction to prevent excessive damage.
Sea Hawk and Hawk AX installations can provide remote communication via e-mail and SMS messaging to smart devices enabling damage limitation by corrective action.
Matthew Watson of Honeywell comments, ‘The Sea Hawk’s flexible and high-capacity sensing-array system, combined with its range of standalone and integrated control applications, offers advanced and cost-efficient leak-detection solutions.
‘This is an exciting new product from Honeywell, and we are very much looking forward to introducing it to professional engineers and our network of CentraLine Partners.’
To find out more you can contact CentraLine on 01344 656565.
