Handheld instruments
The FLIR GF77 offers both radiometric temperature measurement and the ability to detect a wide range of gases by simply changing lenses.
for a fifth of the price. “The Si124 basically does the same job and it’s very easy to use,” explains Brett Fleming, corporate manager at SPI Inspections.
IntuItIve and accessIble Features
Because so much of their work is done in the field, it is important to the team at SPI Inspections that their tools are ready for the job. “It’s very user friendly,” says Hunter about the Si124. “Within a half-dozen hours, we were very confident working with it.” “The camera has wonderful clarity for us
in the field,” Hunter continues. He says his team appreciated the quality of the images, ease of download to a laptop or the cloud, and the functionality of the user interface. “We’re guys that have been in construction for 40-plus years - we’ve got arthritis and big swollen fat hands hitting hammers and stuff. The user interfaces - the keys, the touch boards - are very user friendly. We found them very easy to work with.” The Si124 made it much easier to spot failures from the ground. During their test run of the camera, they found a failure on a power line 220 feet up in the air, a difficult issue to detect. “With our drones we could, but we would have known where to look,” says Hunter. “Because of our field experience we were able to pick it out and zoom in on it, then we knew that there was a bit of a problem up there.” “That’s a 25-million-dollar failure on a line
that’s only five years old,” he remarks. With the Si124 they were able to catch the problem early, before the cost to fix it became nearly that high.
saFely accessIng dangerous areas
Electrical substations and other utility infrastructure present numerous hazards for
Instrumentation Monthly May 2021
workers and inspectors. When the team confronted a particularly dangerous area inside the substation where a capacitor bank had come down, they were required to stay outside the chain-link fence enclosing the area. They were pleased to find that the Si124 could look through the fence to assess the situation. “We were able to walk right up, and we
could look right through the chain-link fence. Because there’s 124 microphones on the front of the camera and then one little tiny camera,” Hunter explains, “that camera was able to look right through that two by two inch square and keep our people safe, which is a huge advantage for us being in the field.”
catchIng Problems beFore they become catastroPhes
SPI’s goal during inspections is to catch issues before they are allowed to escalate too far. Spotting partial discharge and corona early with tools like the Si124 helps them anticipate failures and keep the lights on for their clients. “It allows us to preemptively prognosticate what’s happening in our power line,” says Hunter. “So instead of there being a catastrophic failure and then an outage and a repair, we can go in ahead of time and we can tell them, ‘hey, you’re going to have a problem with this if you don’t fix it’.” Unplanned outages can be prevented with regular inspection and maintenance. “If we do our jobs right, nobody ever knows we’re out there. The customer doesn’t know we’re there; we go do our job, we make recommendations, and then through planned outages or regular maintenance they can repair something.”
SPI Inspections
www.spiinspections.com FLIR Systems
www.flir.com 27
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