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Photo Beams
Powered by Solar Towers Make for a Smooth Installation at
Wastewater Plant
The plant in Homestead, Fla., is one of several city facilities using the wireless towers. The high-low dual infrared photoelectric beams operate off of batteries inside the tower that are recharged by the solar panels. When the beams are broken, the towers transmit a radio frequency (RF) signal into a control board that has each area or beam zone identified, explains Matthew Forristall, owner of Aressco Services Inc., Miami, an authorized dealer of the towers and a licensed alarm contractor. The wireless signal can be transmitted up to five miles, and use of a repeater can extend the transmission distance. “There are two relay outputs, and one goes into the master control and voice annunciation panel and one into their computer monitoring network system for the plant,” Forristall relates. “The control panel monitors the zones and alerts the security guard to view the area via video camera from a remote site.” The video cameras record the alarm and a DVR archives it. The incident is recovered by date and time in an event log that records the beam alarms. Forristall estimates the facility’s size at approximately 10 acres, which is covered by 10 towers. “The towers jog back and forth,” he says. “The distance varies. At this facility, we have to turn corners – it’s not perfectly square. Some beams go 30 to 40 feet and then some up to 700 feet.” Each job has its towers custom-designed, depending on the distances they have to project their beams and whether they are corner units or going straight along a perimeter. “When the job is laid out, each tower is designed to go into that typical location,” Forristall notes. The beam towers are mounted on 250-pound concrete cement pedestals. “The installation went really smoothly,” Forristall maintains. “We just dug a hole, put the cement pedestal in the hole and attached the beam to it.” The towers withstood Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma recently, he reports, although the storms were only Category 1 or 2 when they passed over Florida. The beams and video system are always on, even during power outages, but the voice annunciation system can be turned off or bypassed when maintenance is being done around a particular zone’s beams. Installation of the security system at the wastewater treatment plant was completed in November 2005. Bob Houston, CEO, Solarbeam Security LLC, developed the wireless solar towers over the years he and Forristall were in a security company together. Their customers’ wired perimeter security systems around nurseries and auto lots were plagued by lightning strikes from Florida’s frequent afternoon thunderstorms. “So over time, Bob developed the solar-powered beam to limit lightning damage and make installation easier, so you didn’t need a month to dig up the property,” Forristall recalls. “Each tower is isolated, so if it does get hit, it’s just one device, not five units.” The beam towers were developed painstakingly over years of trial and error in real applications, some of them with the city of Homestead, where Solarbeam also is located, Forristall remembers. Solarbeam Security LLC, is now a sole-source vendor for the city. The solar towers are used throughout the United States and even in Oregon, where direct sunlight is less frequent, Houston notes. “Over the years, we’ve done installations around Homestead facilities with earlier generations of beams,” Forristall notes. “The city was already familiar with the product, and since we’re right there in Homestead, it was fairly easy for them to come to us, because they knew we had a product and they had the need.” |
