Surrey Fire & Rescue Service achieves uninterrupted protection for the county
The Challenge
Surrey Fire & Rescue Service provides a 24/7 ‘999’ call centre available to all residents and visitors to their county as well as supporting cover to neighbouring brigades. With direct contact to 24 fire stations, as well as mobile appliances and neighbouring brigades. With direct contact to 24 fire stations, as well as mobile appliances and neighbouring brigades, their Mobilising Control Centre recorded over 15,000 in one year, each typically generating several telephone conversations.
All Surrey Fire & Rescue Service’s 999 calls are routed into their Mobilising Control Centre, where highly skilled control staff manage each call to assess the incident type, salient risk and location before providing critical safety advice and mobilising appropriate resources. Support continues until the incident is successfully resolved. This can include mobilisation of further resources and relief crews, and co-ordination of related services. The Mobilising Control Centre also provides significant further support to the Fire and Rescue Service, handling internal logistic and administrative procedures.
“If we can’t receive the emergency call, we can’t respond and provide our usual high standard of emergency Fire and Rescue cover.”
Kieran Amos, Project Manager (Mobilising Control Projects), Surrey Fire & Rescue
The KUP technical and installation teams were excellent in both developing and implementing an installation plan. It was executed in a safe and professional manner and in a way that significantly mitigated the risk of power supply failure to our critical mobilising systems.
Choosing the right UPS supplier
The Mobilising Control Centre can be considered as the Service’s most fundamentally important core function, and one that must have a power supply resilient to mains failure or interruption. The Service regards the UPS as a key part of the power supply system so when an upgrade became due, choosing the right UPS and supplier was a critical decision.
As Kieran Amos, Project Manager (Mobilising Control Projects) at Surrey Fire & Rescue puts it: “If we can’t receive the emergency call, we can’t respond and provide our usual high standard of emergency Fire and Rescue cover.” When the new contract was offered for competitive tender on the open market a number of bids, including one from the incumbent UPS supplier, were considered by Surrey County Council’s Procurement Team. KOHLER Uninterruptible Power (KUP) proposal was deemed to be the most competitive and the company was awarded the contract accordingly.
Although pricing is important, the quality of both the product and the service from KUP has proved critical in the transition to the new installation. Mr Amos explains: “The installation process was absolutely key to meeting our contractual and user requirements. Due to the configuration of our legacy UPS system, we could not switch off the supply without losing power to both our primary and secondary mobilising control systems, which would have resulted in us being unable to receive 999 calls and mobilise our response resources. Therefore, we required a live transfer from our legacy system to a temporary standby UPS whilst the new UPS system was installed. The KUP technical and installation teams were excellent in both developing and implementing an installation plan. It was executed in a safe and professional manner and in a way that significantly mitigated the risk of power supply failure to our critical mobilising systems.”
The 20kVA KOHLER PW 3000/T UPS supplied by KUP has proven to be a well adapted and successful choice. During installation its dual feed capability facilitated the necessarily complex changeover operation and its transformerless technology meant a footprint considerably smaller than the system it replaced. KUP also installed external batteries to meet the Service’s requirement for extended autonomy. Mr Amos comments: “We appreciate KOHLER PW 3000/T‘s smart appearance, ease of maintenance and user friendliness. In particular, we find the system diagnosis and reporting functions extremely useful and a marked improvement on the earlier system’s user interface.”
Surrey Fire & Rescue Service’s mission is to make Surrey safer. Non-stop operation of the Mobilising Control Centre is vital to the success of this mission, and the Mobilising Control Centre in turn depends on the uninterrupted availability of clean power. The Service’s decision to entrust KUP with responsibility for this has been vindicated, and they look forward to the coming months and years of trouble free power protection.
The outcome
The 20kVA KOHLER PW 3000/T UPS supplied by KUP has proven to be a well adapted and successful choice. During installation its dual feed capability facilitated the necessarily complex changeover operation and its transformerless technology meant a footprint considerably smaller than the system it replaced. KUP also installed external batteries to meet the Service’s requirement for extended autonomy. Mr Amos comments: “We appreciate KOHLER PW 3000/T‘s smart appearance, ease of maintenance and user friendliness. In particular, we find the system diagnosis and reporting functions extremely useful and a marked improvement on the earlier system’s user interface.”
Surrey Fire & Rescue Service’s mission is to make Surrey safer. Non-stop operation of the Mobilising Control Centre is vital to the success of this mission, and the Mobilising Control Centre in turn depends on the uninterrupted availability of clean power. The Service’s decision to entrust KUP with responsibility for this has been vindicated, and they look forward to the coming months and years of trouble free power protection.
“We appreciate KOHLER PW 3000/T‘s smart appearance, ease of maintenance and user friendliness. In particular, we find the system diagnosis and reporting functions extremely useful and a marked improvement on the earlier system’s user interface.”
