Case Study: New Enterprise Stone & Lime

Operators avoid the quarry with remote pump system monitoring

The Challenge

At a stone quarry in Roaring Spring, PA, two powerful 6 in. (15 cm) pumps remove millions of gallons of water each year that builds up from rainfall and runoff. The quarry is one of many mined throughout central Pennsylvania by New Enterprise Stone & Lime Co., Inc. (NES&L), a supplier of aggregate, crushed stone, hot mixed asphalt (HMA), ready-mixed concrete, and other construction materials to customers throughout the northeastern United States.

The stone quarry is not the kind of place you want to walk into to check a pump. So NES&L Automation Manager Ashley Fleck needed a remote management system for the quarry’s unattended pump control system. He wanted electricians and mining technicians to be able to monitor and control the pumps from PCs at company headquarters, and from smartphones and other wireless devices on site.

Since the pump control system uses an Opto 22 SNAP PAC R-series controller and SNAP I/O hardware, Opto 22 products were already on Fleck’s radar.

The Solution

Fleck had heard about groov products from his regional Opto 22 sales engineer and ordered the groov Box hardware appliance.

“groov View turned out to be the perfect tool for the project,” he explains. “We quickly built a web-based interface for the pump control system.”

The groov View interface, running in a browser on a PC, smartphone, or other device, shows key information like operational status, current draw, flow rate, and the water level in the quarry.

If additional information is needed later, it can be easily added to the interface. The process of developing and deploying an HMI with groov View, says Fleck, was “super easy.”

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