Station Monitor Functions

Station Monitoring Functions

provided

StationWatch.com

1. Monitoring of Test Sites

During the testing of new equipment to be used in Service Stations or other Gasoline DIspensing Facilities, it is necessary to monitor the conditions of the site continuously. With StationWatch.com, the monitoring systems are equipped with telephone interfaces and modem logic to enable the monitoring equipment to be "polled" for the measured values, or for the monitoring equipment to call out automatically whenever a unique event (alarm, error code, etc.) needs to be reported as quickly as possible.

The monitoring equipment is usually mounted in "monitor boxes" usually located near the vent stacks of the underground storage tanks (USTs) in order to monitor the UST pressure and temperature. In some cases, an actual analysis of the hydrocarbon (HC) content of the vapors in the UST is required, and the monitor box would then include logic to collect the HC data as well.

Two examples of monitor boxes installed at test sites are shown here. These boxes include redundant pressure transducers and thermocouple junctions. Redundant strip-chart recorders are also shown in these boxes, which has been a standard technique when remote access was not always available. In the StationWatch.com test configuration, the redundant equipment is optional since the site can be monitored remotely at whatever frequency is considered adequate for data collection at a test site. For operational systems (not test sites) the monitor boxes may be much smaller since strip chart recorders are not required with the data logging computers.

The monitor box pictured on the left is mounted on free-standing vent pipes, while the monitor box on the right is mounted on the wall that also serves as the support for the vent pipes. In the event the vent pipes are manifolded, usually only one set of data needs to be monitored for the temperature and pressure of the manifolded USTs.

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