Refrigeration Control System

Precise control and monitoring of your industrial refrigeration facility’s room temperatures.  Accurate and efficient control of refrigeration compressors, condensers, and defrost cycles.  Monitoring and recording of all refrigeration and C.A. parameters eliminates the need for expensive “stand alone” controllers, recorders, and monitors.  Our energy conservation and improved efficiency savings control features come highly recommended and are accepted by energy pay back programs. Don’t get held hostage by billion dollar control software corporations who charge outrageous yearly support fees and don’t care about the needs or wants of the smaller end user, call us because we care about all of our customers big and small!

H.M.I. (Graphics) and Control Program

With over 27 years of combined programming experience we pride ourselves on being original. Being on the leading edge of software development has helped us be one of the leaders of industrial refrigeration controls in the northwest. Using Microsoft’s ^TM newest programming language .NET^TM we can ride the wave of new technologies without the burden of costly retooling and training, and as new technologies come to market our software will be ready. Also we have successfully been using networking in the industrial field years before its popularity has reached the industrial and control software trades, which goes to show we try to stay a step ahead of the industry.

H.M.I. (Graphics) Program
Our H.M.I. package is easily customized by the end user without knowing how to program or calling the manufacturer to make screen changes for you. The screens can be easily switched from graphics to text mode. Operator interfacing is made easy by using the mouse to point, click, or hover on equipment and see conditions or other control setup screens. Use our included bit maps or you can use your own pictures in bit map form to set the background or to show your own equipment on screen. The security of this program is separate from the operating system so each user can be assigned rights to how much they can do, these rights can be configured by the operator or administrator. Also a full security record is kept of who logged in and what they have changed.  The H.M.I. computer can be used as a temporary system backup by plugging the H.M.I. computer in place of the Controller. Our H.M.I. backup scheme is constantly updated from the Controller so you can unplug one machine and plug in the other with no worries. Also the program can compress data for easy data transfer or backup to a write able CD. There are so many more features of the H.M.I. that it would be better for us to show you first hand all that we have to offer.



Control Program
The Control package is a totally new program built on the Windows .Net^TM platform, and this gives us a huge advantage over the very stable but outdated DOS package we provided in the past. Thinking back to where we came from and thinking ahead to the future we find that our roots run deep in the experience we received from the older program, and as times change technology gets faster, better, and richer in resources, so we took our experience and built a system that can be easily updated to work with future technologies and still have the stability you can trust.
Only some the features and control practices we used in the past are still in the new program but we have added more flexibility and allowed customers to really fine tune their systems to their liking. For example all the defrost steps are now available for the operator to change, and alarms can be set to dial out, signal a horn, or do nothing but alert you on the screen. Also we follow the Industrial Control industries recommendation that where system uptime is critical controls should be separate from the H.M.I. system. Our control package is separated from the H.M.I. so you will have double the protection and the second machine is always available as an emergency backup. In today’s age of computers, lockups are possible on a computer being used for multiple tasks, but with the controller being separate, and your H.M.I. computer goes down, control of your facility will keep running. This is not possible on most systems produced by our competitors today.

Gas Control Systems Inc. CO2 Scrubber Control

Our computer control system communicates to the CA Equipment and takes over control of Carbon Dioxide scrubbing. This allows the most efficient use of the generator and saves energy. Relax and let our computer control system control your ‘Gas Control Systems’ scrubber. Does your scrubber allow you to do that? If not give us a call and we can quote you one that will!

Remote System Access

Internet or Modem connections can provide complete offsite control and monitoring of facilities from remote locations. Our customers have used both, and we recommend an Internet connection for faster and more reliable access.

Alarm Functions

Alarm signals can be provided for any critical parameters. Auto dialer for alarm connection through the phone system as well as audible alarms are available.  Back-up power supply for computer protection and to provide 15 minutes of computer operation in the event of a power failure. Also the controller will restart automatically when power resumes.

Troubleshooting

The control system provides valuable trending information which can allow operators and refrigeration servicemen to pinpoint problems more quickly. Also a new feature has been added, an Opto equipment scanner. You can watch the communication to your boards and see if there are any errors in communicating, and you can see addresses and board information by clicking on a board address. When the zone is off in the control program you can manually turn controls on and off or change analog data to test a zone.


RS-485 Remote Device Control

RS-485 is a separate serial interface from the RS-422 serial interface we use to control our Opto 22 hardware. While the Opto 22 hardware is taking care of many other functions in the system, we can control RS-485 devices at the same time. Devices that incorporate the RS-485 serial interface can be remote controlled and monitored by our Advanced System Control program. Using RS-485 at one facility we currently control and monitor sixty-seven VFD drives and at another facility we currently control and monitor seven Frick micros through RS-485, there are many more devices we can incorporate in to our system. This way of controlling the devices saves the customer money because extra Opto 22 hardware is not needed. Why install duplicate hardware to do the same control that the device can do itself?

Energy Saving Features

Carbon Dioxide scrubber control. Interfacing with the scrubber controller aids in the efficient use of the generator, which saves run-time and electricity. This technology makes this one of the most energy efficient scrubbers in the world.

Variable Frequency Drive or VFD control. Interfacing with VFD controllers to control and display evaporator, condenser fan, and refrigeration compressor speed.

Fan cycling - evaporator fans can be cycled off periodically after a storage room has been cooled to set point temperature. The control program fan cycling methods use room temperature data to override the off cycle length and restart the fans if the temperature increases. Fan cycling will result in a substantial reduction in compressor energy consumption since the evaporator fans are a major source of heat in the storage rooms after the product is cooled.

Intelligent timing of defrosting to minimize defrost occurrence to further limit room temperature drift, as well as reduce over-all energy consumption. Also defrost schedules are set up by week so you could have only one defrost a week if that is all you need.

Optimum compressor control - the control system accurately controls suction pressure with an efficient mix of compressors to maintain the highest possible suction pressure which will still maintain the desired storage temperatures.



Graphical Data

Everything we control or monitor is being saved to encrypted files for easy viewing or printing and data integrity. Graphs and or log sheets are available for use in troubleshooting or room certification by on screen viewing and high quality print outs. Templates can be made for any type of graph or log sheet, for each zone or just to see combined information on a graph. Individual probe temperature data for twenty-four hour plotting, weekly graphs of average temperature and gas concentrations, machine room information etc. can be plotted. Graphs can be saved as bitmaps or JPEGs, log sheets can be saved as an Excel^TM usable .csv, comma separated, or tab separated file for easy import to spreadsheets.