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Water ingress monitoring

The importance of water ingress monitoring and the benefits it offers

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OmniWatch dashboard

News: New indoor air quality monitoring to limit the spread of Covid-19 and other aerosol related infections.

Monitoring specialists

Spook's award winning remote monitoring service called OmniWatch monitors water ingress. Measuring the presence of water across many different assets and areas; OmniWatch presents realtime readings in an easy to use real-time digital dashboard.

Spook and OmniWatch was voted Specialist Technology Company of the Year and Most Innovative Solution of the Year at the annual UK CIR Business Continuity Awards.

The importance of water ingress monitoring

Often a water problem can be festering for some time unbeknown to employees, for example underneath a raised floor or above a false ceiling.

Early detection gives valuable advanced warning of a water related event that, if went unnoticed, could cause considerable disruption.

From a point of view of remedying the situation, this usually is a time consuming process to dry out an areas water damaged area and ensure health and safety guidelines are met during the process.

Pipes can burst and air conditioning units and cooling systems can leak from a failed condensation pump, broken supply lines or clogged drains. Sprinkler systems can malfunction too.

Common areas for water ingress monitoring

Server rooms and data centers

Spook remotely monitors for water ingress in key areas that need to be dry or to prevent leaking and flooding. Water ingress monitoring is prevalent in areas that contain high levels of electrical assets such as server rooms and data centers.

IT rooms normally have false ceilings and false floors, so often a burst pipe or area of water ingress can go unnoticed until its too late.

Naturally, it is important to isolate electrical equipment from areas of water ingress at the earliest opportunity.

Commercial buildings and residential properties

Water insurance claims has been an issue for UK insurers for a number of years. A water claim can result from many incidents such as a burst pipe, backed up drain or a flood caused by heavy rain. Nearly all buildings are at risk.

Water insurance claims are consistently one of the most expensive, costing insurers an estimated £1.8m a day (accurate July 2022), and are on the rise.

As a result of the increasing costs and number of water damage claims, insurers are administering substantial premium increases and applying higher insurance claim excess payments to premises where water ingress continues to be an issue.

Flat roofs and guttering

A building that has a flat roof can be prone to water ingress as water from the elements does not have a viable escape route. If water does build up on a flat roof or a building with blocked guttering it is not unusual for the room beneath the build up of water to suffer leaks.

The labour and effort to recover from such events can be prolonged as suitable drying out processes are employed. This can cause the area that is affected to be uninhabitable for a number of days or even weeks.

Commercial basements

Organisations usually reserve underground access points to areas for general use such as car parking. However, with the recent changes to the climate, and unusual weather patterns, means such areas are prone to flooding.

Thought should be given to how, in the event of a deluge of water, will staff and visitors be able to safely access the area where their cars are parked or exit the area safely.

Diesel generators

Generators are often installed in basements of buildings or in secure areas outside the building. Generators only usually get visited when there is a test or when they are invoked in order to provide emergency power generation.

If flooding occurs in the area where the generator is installed it is important to know as soon as possible as this will more often than not prevent staff and maintenance engineers open access to the area.

Pipes and boilers

Buildings have to install pipework throughout to provide pressurised water to its facility. Pipes have natural stress points in elbows and linkages of long areas of pressurised water. It is easy to miss a burst pipe or leaking boiler point until it is too late.

Water needs to be cut off from the affected area in order to address the problem. Depending on where the influx of water is, this could cause disruption to large areas of a building or facility.

Example manufacturers

Andel
Aqualeak
Aquilar
Hochiki
Vimpex

And more.

Water sensors

There are many different types of water sensor, each designed to detect for wetness in specific areas, examples of this are third party water detection panels, water ropes, water point detectors, water pads and water level probes.

Proper placement of water sensors is key. Water tends to puddle at the lowest point of the floor and underneath pipe junctions and air conditioning units.

Should a water sensor be placed too high it won't trigger an alarm until after a serious flood has occurred.

Example protocols

LoRaWAN
SNMP
BACNet
Modbus
VFCs

And more.


OmniWatch key features

Cloud based

OmniWatch is cloud based and is accessed via any internet enabled device.

3-tier alarms

Alarms are handled using Spook's unique 3-tier alarm escalation process.

View more

Digital dashboards

OmniWatch dashboards provide interactive and intuitive access to sensor readings 24/7.

Scaleable installations

Totally scaleable from a handful of sensors to a global solution monitoring 1000s of devices.

Trend analysis

Sensor readings are held in perpetuity; providing accurate historical trend analysis.

Automated reporting

Comprehensive reports can be scheduled to be auto emailed daily, weekly and monthly.

East Riding of Yorkshire Council

We have a server room in the basement of our showcase store in London. We had a water detection service installed but this failed when we had a deluge of water enter the room from a duct we thought was water tight. We decided to extend our existing server room climate monitoring service with Spook to include independent Spook wireless water ropes and to decommission the 3rd party service that failed. Since then, a few water based alerts have been picked up in their early stages thanks to Spook.

Waterstones, the UK's only national bookshop chain.

Fun fact

Introduction

Pure water does not conduct electricity because because of its lack of free electrons and therefore it does not contain ions (Ions are formed when atoms lose or gain electrons). For water conductivity to be viable the water needs to contain ions.

Stephen Gray

Stephen Gray an English astronomer and dyer studied electrical conduction and was the first person to discover that electricity can flow through wires. Up until his work, published in 1729, all other studies into electricity focussed on the generation of static electrical charges. Thanks to his contribution the study of how water conducts electricity could be made. However, it's taken nearly two hundred years for scientists to witness exactly how this happens.

As impure water has positive and negative ions contained within it in, positive ions are attracted to a negative pole and vice versa. As the ions are attracted to each pole a short circuit is induced and this is a fundamental process for developing water detection sensors.

Stephen Gray received the first 'Copley Medal' instituted by the Royal Society, in 1731. However most of his works went unacknowledged and he died as a pauper.

Copley Medal

The Copley Medal was created following a donation of £100 to be used for carrying out experiments by Sir David copley and has been awarded most years since Stephen Grays first win; he in-fact won it again in 1732.

Other notable winners the Copley Medal were: Benjamin Franklin (1753), James Cook (1776), William Herschel (1761), Michael Faraday (1832 & 1838), John Herschel (1847), Charles Darwin (1864), Albert Einstein (1925), Francis Crick (1975), John Maynard Smith (1999), Stephen Hawking (2006) and Peter Higgs (2015).

Support for new monitoring customers

New to monitoring

We help organisations start monitoring projects from scratch. We have a wealth of experience that is free and helpful in creating an informed approach to monitoring.

We are also resellers to industry leading sensor and equipment manufacturers and can recommend the most appropriate hardware and sensors to fit any size monitoring project.

"

We had been considering monitoring for a while but did not have the resource or the knowledge to fully understand how to go about doing things from scratch.

We approached Spook as they have lots of experience in looking independently at monitoring projects. They recommended and provided the most appropriate hardware and sensors for us.

The sensors arrived pre-configured and were implemented on OmniWatch by Spook before we installed them.

VAX
Support for customers with existing monitoring

Additional monitoring

Many of our customers have tried monitoring for themselves.

This ranges from institutions that rely on equipment onboard data loggers and communications cards; to organisations that have started monitoring projects but need help to extend monitoring to new areas and/or implement a central monitoring solution.

"

We needed a remote monitoring service that did not require an on premise PC and was independent of our network.

Spook provided pre-configured cellular routers for each of our five locations across the UK. The whole project was a simple plug-and-play solution with no involvement from us.

NHS Business Services Authority
"

We had been considering monitoring for a while but did not have the resource or the knowledge to fully understand how to go about doing things.

When we Googled the various areas of interest we got more confused.

We approached Spook as they have a different outlook to simply buying hardware and sensors. Thankfully we now have a fully installed, joined up monitoring solution.

VAX
"

We had a series of climate monitors installed in our server rooms. Due to a change in our security policy we needed a remote monitoring service that did not require an on premise PC and was independent of our network.

Spook suggested a technology upgrade and provided pre-configured cellular routers for each of our five server locations across the UK. The whole project was a simple plug-and-play solution with no involvement from us.

NHS Business Services Authority

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Used by

888
Generali
Creative Assembly
East Riding of Yorkshire
Fiskars
Friends Provident
Greene King
Handelsbanken
Hilti
Muller
NHS
Nisa
P&O Ferrymasters
Reed
St Albans
Thermo Fisher
Vax
Waterstones
  • 888
  • Generali
  • Creative Assembly
  • East Riding of Yorkshire
  • Fiskars
  • Friends Provident
  • Greene King
  • Handelsbanken
  • Hilti
  • Muller
  • NHS
  • Nisa
  • P&O Ferrymasters
  • Reed
  • St Albans
  • Thermo Fisher
  • Vax
  • Waterstones

Get in touch with Spook

Please contact us if you wish for further information on how Spook can help with your environmental and power monitoring needs.

Contact us