Josh Pringle, Vice-President of Business Development and Operations and CO2Meter broke the news just hours ago, and the gasworld audience was the first to hear it.
“We have been working with the folks at Pulsa for about a year now to integrate the monitoring piece of safety into the telemetry side of things,” Pringle said.
“I am happy to be breaking the news here today for the folks at gasworld and give you all a bit of a sneak preview. It’s [the partnership] still in its infancy stages, but we’re working out the technology pieces and we’re really excited.”
The breaking of such news followed an informative talk from Pringle which focused on how digitalisation is changing and evolving CO2 detection and monitoring.
Starting his discussion, Pringle, said, “I think the best place to start is with an idiom that I think most people are familiar with, and that’s the canary in the coal mine.”
“Back in the pre nineteen hundreds, the ability to do gas detection really did rely on the simplicity of putting a small bird into a confined space such as a coal mine to detect whether there were hazardous levels of gas. Since then, the advent of new technologies has grown exponentially, but more in the last 20 to 30 years than ever before.”
“What we’re now seeing is a growth in the marketplace, both from the sensing technologies, as well as the applications that allow is this burgeoning market to continue to grow. But it just doesn’t grow up, it grows broad too. 50 years ago there were maybe a couple of dozen applications for the gas and now we’re talking about thousands of applications for the gas.”
“Today the opportunity to use technology to meet the needs of those customers across such a broad spectrum is critical not just for us, but the entire market. One of the examples I would give you is if you went back 30 or 40 years, a CO2 sensor, the heartbeat of the device itself, was the size of a suitcase and costs maybe $30,000. Today, our partners been able to shrink sensor technology down to the size of almost a thumbnail and less than one hundred dollars for that piece of equipment.”
“The ability to get smaller, but also maintain or improve on accuracy, repeatability, reliability, the long-term life of the sensor, those pieces and growth and that advancement in that technology has really meant tremendous change in the marketplaces.”
Following Pringle was David Wiens, CEO of Pulsa Sensors – and what a great time it was to welcome the company into the webinar. Of course, the newly announced partnership had to be the main topic of conversation here.
“In a couple of months, we’re going to launch a family of products and you can think of any device that has an analogue or even a digital output, you’ll be able to get online very quickly,” Wiens said.
“It’s the same plug and play style of our other products. Installation and setup should be five to ten minutes and then you can start digitising all of those values. It won’t be a completely wireless system; it’ll be more of logging the data over time so that you have a record and that you can have reports on. The user can alert people in remote locations about what’s happening.”
“We’re really excited about this partnership and the CO2 Meter team have been fantastic.”
“The way we build our products as we listen to our customers and our partners, and we think this represents a large opportunity and so we’re very excited to launch the product. I’d say in general, it’s a very exciting time, and we’re really just scratching the surface. What we’re seeing is there’s almost an unlimited opportunity in the market.”
Following discussions from CO2 Meter and Pulsa, was David Schaer, President of Computers Unlimited. “I think what we’ve seen happen is really this creation for the need of digital infrastructure for distributors,” Schaer said.
“I think the pandemic has accelerated this rapidly – it would have taken probably several years, has been compressed down to several months – and we see that left and right. Probably one really great example is just when we talk about business processes and mobilising and digitising every single business process you have from filling to billing.”
“We see tremendous use in this thing called a smartphone that’s connected and integrated, and now it’s being applied to various business operations inside the fill plant, for example, where these technologies are used to forecast schedule and fill cylinders.”
“I think with the move to digitalisation, it really forced businesses to say we have to go digital because in many cases, employees were working at home. And so how do you keep people connected and productive? You have to migrate to this new type of a digital infrastructure.”
“And other areas, if you go outside the fill plant is to the delivery itself, where you can now create a digital footprint with these devices and measure/monitor the entire delivery and the cellular movement from fill, to loading on the truck, to making that delivery to the customer or the branch, to processing the electronic payment right at the point of delivery.”
“It’s an exciting time to be a software developer and a software integrator and play a vital role in being able to connect the dots here for a true digital infrastructure,” Schaer concluded
The whole webinar can be watched on demand at gasworldtv.com