FRACKVILLE - A power surge that damaged a portion of a control system at the Frackville Area Municipal Authority wastewater treatment plant has prompted a replacement of the entire control unit.
Even though the entire control system will be replaced instead of just the damaged parts, the cost will be about the same.
The FAMA board discussed and approved the equipment upgrade at its March 19 meeting.
On Monday, office manager Rhonda Frantz explained that the recommendation to replace the entire controller came from Melborne Electric LLC, Wyoming, Pa., after a damage assessment.
"It involves the PLC (programmable logic controller) board. We had a power outage last week or so. When the power went out at the sewage treatment plant, it had burned out one of the boards in the PLC panel," Frantz said. "We had Melborne Electric come in to look at it. The electrician said the panel is over 20 years, which makes it as old as the plant, and he said the whole thing should be replaced along with the surge protector, which is basically antiquated. He feels that if we have another surge like that, the whole panel could get blown out. If that happened, everything would need to be handled manually at the plant."
Frantz said Melborne presented a proposal to replace the entire controller unit at a cost of $20,900.
"The electrician said he could replace that board that burned out, but it would have cost about $20,000 just to replace that part because it is so old," Frantz said. "He said to just upgrade the whole panel and that would be $20,900, and then it would be modern technology."
Senior Project Manager Donald M. Cuff at Entech Engineering Inc., the authority's consulting engineers, said the upgrade of the PLC equipment and the Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition is due.
"They (Melborne) found evidence that the equipment must have taken a surge at one time," Cuff said, explaining that it is difficult to know whether the controller would be able to handle another power surge.
Cuff agreed that the damage section could be replaced, but it would be older equipment.
"They could replace it in-kind, but then you would be using 1990s-vintage technology," Cuff said. "The board decided to replace it with the newer technology. The older technology is basically obsolete, but they're also expensive to purchase rather than getting the new off-the-shelf items."
Cuff explained the PLC "monitors the operation of the plant and alerts the operators if the plant is operating outside the bounds that are put in the system. In turn, it allows the operator to make adjustments not only at the plant, but also remotely using a laptop."
He added, "The very large panel that is there now will no longer be utilized and it will basically be run off of a computer."