Sometimes it's the simple things … DCO Systems real-time monitoring solutions help to diagnose training issues in NHS hospital's energy efficiency equipment.

Hospitals rely heavily on a sound infrastructure to deliver critical services. Given the high demand for Heating and Hot Water, maximising equipment performance is vital. With the UK Government's target of a 34% carbon reduction across hospital estates by 2020 a key consideration, the NHS and their partners are seeking new ways to improve their steam boiler equipment.

Working with an industrial steam equipment supplier and the NHS, we deployed our real-time monitoring solution throughout an energy recovery system used to pre-heat feed and heating water using waste exhaust gases.

Once installed monitoring ran successfully for several months without significant incident, building up a valuable data set of system performance and operating parameters. However, the equipment being monitored suddenly began to experience regular downtime and outages – leading to a reduction in overall system performance and efficiency.

Working with the facilities management team at the site our partner was able to use the performance and availability data to focus on analysing specific outages. This enabled the root cause to be diagnosed as operator error – a misunderstanding during training of a new maintenance team was causing the system to be shut down when it should not have been. Once operator training was updated the system was restored to normal working.

In any complex system with multiple equipment providers and maintainers clearly identifying and logging faults and outages is critical to successfully resolving failures. With multiple parties involved the performance and availability data made available through DCO Systems' DiscoverRA monitoring solution enabled everyone to agree on the nature of the fault, to isolate the root cause and resolve the issue.