Orlando Utilities Commission Prevents Network Outages with their T/Mon Master Station

Over the last century, as Orlando evolved from a small town into a vibrant city, the Orlando Utilities Commission has been a community backbone. For 90 years, the OUC has been serving residential and commercial customers with dependable, low-cost electric and water services.

The OUC has won numerous awards for its outstanding and reliable service to its customers, including the award for the most reliable electric utility in the Southeastern United States and award for the best drinking water in 2004. By deploying powerful DPS monitoring solutions, the OUC is able to keep their network and infrastructure online to provide reliable service to their many customers.

Orlando Utilities uses a T/Mon master station to collect the alarms from all of their equipment throughout their network in one, centralized location. However, Duane Gunsch and Bob Anderson, both Communications Technicians with OUC, knew they could get more out of their T/Mon.

After a remote site fan failure, the "DPS was the only solution that could report" the problem

Gunsch said he has had experience using other monitoring gear in the past, but no other system worked quite like DPS solutions. "I have experience with older and proprietary gear," said Gunsch, "and as a comparison, I really like the DPS products.

"Recently one of our substations reported a Fan 1 failed alarm. We would have never had any idea about a fan failing with the other system we were looking at - DPS was the only solution that could report that to us."

In the short time they've had the T/Mon it has really paid off by preventing multiple problems. "Once we received a door alarm, so we went out there and saw the door was open with nobody out there" Gunsch told us. "It helped us identify and jump on something that could have been a bad situation."

On another occasion a cooling system went down - leaving their expensive gear at risk for a thermal shutdown. "Recently one of our substations reported a Fan 1 failed alarm," said Anderson. "We would have never had any idea about a fan failing with the other system we were looking at - DPS was the only solution that could report that to us."

"The T/Mon is a brand new system for us, and we have high hopes for it."

The OUC discovers the multi-protocol flexibility of T/Mon

Since they weren't using their T/Mon to its full potential, OUC wanted to learn what it took to maximize its alarm monitoring capabilities.

The OUC both realized that the best way to learn how to use their T/Mon would be training directly from the manufacturer. In April of 2012, they both attended DPS Factory Training at DPS Headquarters in Fresno, California. Here they got hands-on experience from the experts themselves.

Leveraging T/Mon's extensive device support avoids expensive infrastructure upgrades With their T/Mon in place, the OUC has been able to continue providing reliable service to all of their customers. Their T/Mon gives them they network reliability they need and the ability to bring together all of the devices on their network into one central location. They didn't have to replace their existing infrastructure to get the centralized monitoring they needed, because T/Mon was able to support all of the protocols of their existing devices.

With their new T/Mon knowledge, Gunsch and Anderson are ready to return home and get started using their T/Mon to its full potential. "The T/Mon is a brand new system for us," Gunsch told us, "and we have very high hopes for it."