SWIM PC AUTOMATION and MONITORING

CANADIAN RESEARCH and DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES

COMMERCIAL SWIM PC's in ACTION

Our SWIM PC technology has been put to use in a wide variety of commercial uses.

We're monitoring the usage of water for the Touchless Car Wash company's headquarters. The SWIM PC has an input for a pulse flow meter. We also supply these flow meters. The two monitored sites are at www.powerstripsolar.com/swimpc/04C021 and www.powerstripsolar.com/swimpc/04C028

We're monitoring and controlling two evacuated tube space heating systems in Colorado at www.powerstripsolar.com/swimpc/04C023 and www.powerstripsolar.com/swimpc/04C029 We came up with the control strategy for the customer. The evacuated tubes are used directly in this application meaning they are vulnerable to thermal shock. We added a feature to our product where solar would not turn on above a certain adjustable solar on differential. When the collectors are hot solar can't come on. There are potential issues but monitoring will tell us if for example, the tank reaches setpoint early in the day and then cannot turn on again. Does that happen? Is it an issue? So far in a year's worth of monitoring at the two sites we haven't seen a problem. This control strategy feature seems to be a good one. An issue we have with evacuated tubes is that like the boxed and glazed collector temperature issues with the Maxxine Wright project the collector temperature becomes the solar return temperature as soon as flow hits it. This cycles the control. With evacuated tubes we don't have a good solution yet. Again a whole industry with hundreds of successful demonstrations and every one of them is losing significant power due to cycling. Monitoring teaches us what the issues are and allows us to fix them. We're reduced the problem dramatically by setting the differentials low.

The Wildcat Cliffs Country Club in North Carolina is one of our first monitored sites. Here the owners get great use of the ability to schedule their boiler through an interface that looks like this. The user name and password are both "demo". Take it for a test ride. The monitored data site is linked here

The Coronado High School Powerstrip solar pool heating system does not have a reliable internet connection but the data is all stored on the unit's SD card anyway so whenever we're in the area we stop by and download all the missing data and add it to the web page linked to the image to the right.

This page is under construction. We have many more active sites to add.