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paulengr

Reliable CEMS System

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Anyone know of a reliable CEMS (continuous emission monitoring system) that is reliable? Here's my review of the ones that GE installs: they stink. They are not reliable. They are a constant maintenance chore. The last time they tried to install a CO monitor, it only took 3 times before they brought one in that was actually functional out of the box. The tech that they almost always send (nickname: turtle) usually has to be trained to repair their equipment that he is supposed to be trained on. Their software is very buggy and 99.999% undocumented. They don't even know what does what. And you can't work on the software when they screw it up again for you. And then eventually you get "black listed" when they realize that you are holding them to their contractual gaurantees such as when they try to charge $15,000 for a sampling line cleaning system and then after 4 months of headaches, they tell you "oh, this is for a dry system and you have a wet scrubber". Shame on us for insisting that they install a working system while we're busy eating fines from the state for running with a defective system while they experiment with the idea of making it work! At this point it seems like just about anyone would be preferable to the nightmare that GE has been.

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Never used a CEMS , but we do a lot of LEL sensors, for those we usually use MSA. We do have another brand we use were response time is critical < 1 second, but they are very pricey. I know MSA has CO monitoring devies, but have never used them for anything other than flamables. http://www.msanorthamerica.com/catalog/product21010.html The above is a link to thier Z-guard sensor.

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Wow - that's one monster rant. Entertaining as it may be, remind me to never get on your bad side.

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We evaluated GE's CEMS DAHS system about 5 years ago. The competing system from ESC beat them out and it sounds like we should be glad it did! Our power plants had systems from a vendor that went out of business and software support for it was extremely limited. Thus, our company sought out a new DAHS and CEMS software package and interfaced it to the existing sampling system and analyzers. We yanked out the old PLC-5's and replaced them with ESC's 8832 dataloggers. The 8832 dataloggers are rackmount specialized application specific machines and have proved reliable and dependable. A few of the people that were with the original suppliers of our CEMS systems (STI Grasby that was bought by Thermo Environmental and put away) have formed a new company, STI CEMS Services. You might try them as they work with many CEMS systems and should be able to give you some advice. They make a sampling probe assembly and they also do field service work. http://www.sticems.com/index.htm ESC, Environmental Systems Corporation, is our DAHS and CEMS software vendor. StackVision is what they call thier CEMS software package. I believe that they can also supply complete CEMS systems including the sampling system and analyzers. http://envirosys.com/ BTW, we are using Thermo Environmental's CO2 & NOx analyzers. They work pretty well. CEMS systems are pretty simple but they are finicky. One piece of dirt clogs your critical sampling orifice, or a leaky o-ring or sample pump diaphragm screws up your dilution. The probe and sample transport system to your analyzers has to be working good. Analyzers have thier problems in that some of thier internal components periodically go bad or degrade. Maintenance intensive systems. I have five of them to keep up with. Hope I helped! Greg

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