My name is Steven Baird and I’ve been with Armstrong for 17 years, exclusively in the fire product group. My current title is Global Product Manager for Fire Systems and in this role, I help lead the development and marketing of our fire protection solutions around the world. I’m also currently sitting on the NFPA 20 technical committee as a principal member and I have a degree in electrical engineering.
The definition of a fire pump is that it’s there to protect lives and property against fire by supplying adequate water supply to automatic sprinklers and standpipe systems. Secondarily, it is there to meet building codes and insurance requirements.
If you think about it, water-based fire suppression systems only work if there’s enough pressure in the system.
Steven Baird
If you’re using a water tank to supply a fire system, or if you’re an area with low water pressure where you come in, you will need some way to boost that pressure into the system so that the hydrants, the hose cabinets and the sprinklers can all work effectively to suppress fire.
The fire codes and standards for fire protection exist just to define the minimum levels of fire protection based on past experience.
They look at previous fire events and write the codes around ways that things could have been done better to protect the lives of property again. That really sets a baseline for everything that we do and therefore, any product we provide, any service we provide in that industry- we must exceed those minimums.
The big thing for us is a new technology we introduced only last year. It’s relatively new in the fire world. It’s called the self-regulating variable speed fire pump unit.
It exists in NFPA 20 today and it’s a new variable speed fire solution to the marketplace. We are the only manufacturer with a UL listed version of that solution available today. We have two units on the market right now and we’re adding more to that line as we move forward.
What really makes it unique is it’s changing the math around variable speed fire pump systems. Where in the past you could get variable speed fire pump systems, either on diesel sets, using a pressure limiting device or through a fire pump controller which is designed for variable speed.
Both those solutions are relatively expensive, considering the benefits you can get from using variable speed fire systems. At Armstrong we call this new self-regulating variable speed fire pump unit the Design Envelope Fire Pump. What that allows you to do is at a much lower price point; you can add variable speed to the system and take advantage of what that can do.
We used that capability to develop a solution specifically for fire applications, integrated with the Design Envelope Variable Speed Fire Pump Unit. It’s called the Fire Pump Manager. Each time the fire pump operates, the system collects data once per minute and transmits it to our cloud-based platform. This enables detailed performance monitoring and captures information that would otherwise be unavailable.
It enables you to see: what the suction pressure was, how fast the pump was running, what flow and head were being produced by the pump and what that means in terms of the discharge head going into your system.
Steven Baird
This is in addition to extensive information around the electrical system with current draw, power draw and the voltage being used. With all that information, you get a much better sense of the health of your fire pump and even your overall fire system.
Once a minute as the pump runs and sends out a data packet. All this information is stored in this cloud server for anybody who’s got access to it, they can log in from anywhere in the world through a web browser and look at this data. This enables them to see exactly when the fire pump run and how it performed.
If you compare over time, you can see if there’s been any degradation in the system and if you may need to complete maintenance work.
I recently spoke to our Sales team about what the deciding factors were for customers on some of the most recent design envelope fire orders.
It was funny, the last two orders that we took each had different value propositions that made the sale for the customer. The first one was a situation where they had greatly varying suction pressures coming into this system and they were looking at installing a ground level water tank.
That takes up a huge amount of space and it’s very expensive, but they were able to look at the design of a fire pump. They could see that with the compensation that the variable speed can do in terms of manipulating the pressures into the system, they could just install a variable speed design envelope fire pump rather than this ground level tank. It came down to the variable speed solution being needed to help them save a lot on that side.
The second sale was really about the connectiveness. The customer was already using Armstrong HVAC pumps in the rest of the building and they were interested in having that same connectivity for their fire pump and using this fire pump manager system so they could again, see what’s happening with the fire pump through the cloud. That was really the big selling point for them. What they really wanted was the connectivity and be able to see what the fire pump was doing at all times.
It’s a major initiative here at Armstrong. It’s really built into our core values. If you look at our HVAC equipment, the major selling feature around that is energy usage reduction and it all feeds back to this whole idea of a planet proposition where we’re more environmentally friendly.
Internally, we have companywide initiatives towards sustainability that include efforts to reduce our fuel usage, energy consumption, water usage and waste to landfill.
Steven Baird
Armstrong is an ISO 14001 certified company, each of our facilities globally have been certified to that standard. We’re continually adding additional initiatives around this at each facility to try and improve as much as we possibly can.
We’re going to continue with our rollout of our variable speed design envelope fire pump line. We’ve got more pumps that are coming through testing now.
We’re looking to get feedback from our customers on some additional things that we can add to that to continue to improve and add more value to our customers. Another significant piece of progress is that we are rolling out a mobile app, so that instead of having to connect through a browser on a laptop, you’ll have an app that’s directly on your phone that you can just hook into your pumps and see what’s going on with them.
In that same application, we’re looking to add some predictive maintenance using analytics. Through the cloud, we’ll be able to see what’s happening with the different pumps at different locations and provide customers advice.
