RF500A Help Manual
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Temperature Alarms

The graph below shows a temperature profile for a transmitter tasked for 15 minutes log rate, the High Alarm at 5.0 and Low Alarm at 1.0, and 5 minute alarm delay.

The curve indicates the actual temperature being sampled by RF500. The small dots indicate the sampling at 1 minute intervals.

The large black dots indicate readings logged at 15 minute (log rate) intervals.

When the temperature goes out-of-limit, extra records are logged as indicated by the blue dots as follows:


A The record logged as the temperature goes out-of-limit (high)

B The record logged because the temperature has remained out-of-limit
throughout the alarm delay

C The maximum temperature reached for the out-of-limit period

D The record logged as the temperature again becomes within limits

E The record logged as the temperature goes out-of-limit (low)

F The minimum temperature reached for the out-of-limit period

G The record logged because the temperature has remained out-of-limit
throughout the alarm delay

H The record logged as the temperature again becomes Low Alarm within
limits

Figure 1 - Transmitter Alarms

Points B and G correspond to data records which generate alarm Events. They cause the transmitter to have an unacknowledged alarm which in turn generates notifications according to the Location in which the transmitter is placed. These alarm Event records are shown as entries in the Transmitter Events Page and in the Audit Trail.


Door Alarms

RF500 includes two types of Door Alarm:

Continuous Door Alarm Alarm on Door continuously open for a period of more than X minutes
Average Door Alarm Alarm on Door open for more than X minutes cumulatively in a given period of up to 60 minutes. This alarm captures many individual shorter door open times that may fail to trigger a continuous door alarm but are nonetheless still important.


Both continuous and average door alarms are enabled or disabled together, therefore if the average door alarm is not required, setting the average limit equal to the average period causes the average alarm never to occur because the limit can not be exceeded.


Whenever a continuous door alarm is triggered, an Event only is generated, tabular data will not be coloured to indicate the alarm.

Date / Time Fence Gate
01 Jul 2010 08:07 25.7 °C 12 (32.19%)

A representation of tabular data shown above shows a typical reading. The readings reported for the door channel are given as two values:


The percentage gives a measure of how much time a door actually spends opened which could represent a problem in a real world application. Consider the following scenario:

A door to a laboratory is monitored using RF500 and the continuous alarm is set to 20 minutes to capture a “door left open” event. If that door is opened then closed after 19 minutes have elapsed, then immediately opened again for 19 minutes then closed, the continuous alarm event would not have been generated; however that door has effectively been open for 38 minutes during the previous 40 minutes or so. With an averaging interval of 60 minutes the RF500 system would report a door reading of approximately 63% or with an averaging interval of 40 minutes a door reading of close to 100% would be reported. It may be the case that this high level of “door open” condition may cause environmental controls to be overloaded.


Dynamic Alarms

Dynamic alarms allow the transmitter to vary the alarm limits or indeed disable alarms for each 30 minute timeslot throughout a 7-day period. Typical uses for this feature include cycling incubators which cycle between temperatures and chillers which are only active for certain times during the week.

From the Task Setup page, click the Use Alarm Zones button to activate this function. The fixed alarm limits for each channel are replaced by Dynamic Times buttons. For each enabled channel, click the Dynamic Times button to configure the alarm limits for each timeslot of the 7-day period.

Insert Dynamic Alarm Picture Here

Each cell represents the alarm limits for a 30 minute timeslot the first beginning at midnight 00:00 and the last beginning at 23:30. Enter up to four sets or zones of alarm limits as required. To allocate an alarm zone to each cell first click the Slot coloured block to the left of the alarm zone then click the cell to allocate to the selected zone. The area above the M representing Monday, shows which alarm zone has been selected

(In the Figure above the 20.0 to 40.0 zone has been selected and the cell for Tuesday 12:30 is about to be clicked yellow.)

To quickly set the entire grid to one alarm zone click the Set All colour to the right of the chosen alarm zone.

When done click the OK button on the button bar.


Dynamic Alarms for Door Switches

Setup of dynamic alarms for Door Switches is as per temperature or RH channels except only the average alarm limit for Door can be changed dynamically, the continuous alarm limit remains in effect at all times.

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