Available / planned products for that market:
Systems that will enable fire fighters and other first responders to detect and locate electrical problems in homes, buildings and other electrical facilities.
The systems will be composed of wall outlet plugin sockets that will measure and analyze the voltages and currents of the electrical distribution system. The plugin sockets will be connected with one another through powerline and/or RF communication media. The measurements will be analyzed by the plugin units and possibly by a central unit.
Availability status:
Planned product, not available yet.
How will these products be used?
Possible scenario: In the middle of a night, a team of fire fighters reach a house in which the residents have reported an electrical fire smell that they cannot locate. The fire fighters connect several Embedded-Electrician™ plugin units to the wall outlets and activate the appliances in the house. The fire fighter’s commander uses a central Embedded-Electrician™ unit that collects and analyzes the data gathered by the wall outlet units. The result of the analysis enables the fire fighters to detect the source of the electrical fire smell. In the scenario that the fire fighters cannot locate the electrical problem during their investigation on site, they can leave the Embedded-Electrician™ system connected to continue monitoring the electrical system at the home. In case an electrical problem is detected by the automatic system, it will alert the home owners and the fire fighters.
This Embedded-Electrician™ system can be used by professional electricians to further monitor the suspected electrical system.
Competitive Info
Existing equipment and methods used by first-responders to locate the source of smell of an electrical fire include:
Infra-Red cameras: These are useful when the source of the smell is visible. One Infra-Red camera cannot monitor several points of an electrical system at the same time. Infra-Red cameras are not used by most first responders as they are expensive.
Human nose: Although this is not ‘equipment’, it is used by first responders to locate sources of electrical fires. But the human nose method has limitations. They depend on wind direction, on the delay between the initial smell time and the arrival of the first responders, and also depends on the accessibility of the electrical system to human inspection. The accessibility of the electrical system in the basement of a house is much lower than the accessibility of the electrical system in the living-room.
Benefits from using our developments:
Ability to detect and locate electrical fires at an early stage of formation – when only a smell of electrical fire is detected, and the fault does not create any disturbance to the operation of electrical appliances and other electrical machines.
Embedded-Electrician™ systems can be left connected in the suspected system – to monitor the electrical system for periods of hours and days – till the electrical-problem is located and fixed.