TFT Promotes Remote Control Deluge Use For Added Safety

By Ed Ballam

The staff at Task Force Tips (TFT) has a guiding philosophy that has been with the company since the day it started nearly 40 years ago – keep firefighters safe while they do their jobs.

That philosophy has taken a new direction with TFT’s entrance into radio frequency remote-controlled water monitors. The company believes firefighters should not risk their lives – literally – by tending top-mounted monitors, also known as deck or deluge guns.

“We’d like to think the days of the firefighter on top of the truck has come to an end,” said Rod Carringer, TFT’s vice president of sales and marketing. “Even from a staffing level, departments just don’t have the people to stick up there running a monitor.”

Founded in 1968, by the late Clyde McMillan, former fire chief of Gary, Ind., TFT has grown to be a worldwide leader in the design and manufacturing of high tech fire suppression equipment, most notably automatic fire suppression nozzles. The company, located in Valparaiso, Ind., also makes water monitors and large diameter hose appliances, and it recently entered the flexible hard suction hose market.

Stewart McMillan, the founder’s son who is the company’s president and chief executive officer, has given his full support to the remote-control monitor project, including his expertise as an engineer with a degree from Purdue University. He was instrumental in developing the electronics for the devices.

“We see getting firefighters off the tops of trucks as a top priority,” said McMillan, who started working for the family business when he was a teenager. “The pump operator can handle the [radio frequency] monitor and make an initial attack off the [apparatus] booster tank while the crew is getting ready to make entry.

 

McMillan, Carringer and a number of TFT engineers were interviewed at the company’s headquarters in Valparaiso, Ind., built in 1987.

Keeping firefighters off the tops of apparatus has been a primary focus of TFT and a driving force in the company’s efforts to develop remote controlled monitors using pump-panel mounted controls as well as radio frequency units.

Steward McMillan, president and chief executive officer of Task Force Tips, used his expertise as an electrical engineer to help make the company’s monitors fully remote  controlled.   (TFT Photo)

Kansas was one of the first states to establish an initiative to install remote-controlled monitors on apparatus, according to Carringer.

“They were experiencing a tremendous amount of injuries caused by seats on the hoods of brush trucks,” he said. “They’d fall off, get run over or knocked around by branches and limbs.”

Off The Hoods

Kansas officials offered to pay communities 80 percent of the cost of remote-controlled monitors to get the firefighters off the hoods, he said. The Kansas initiative pushed TFT into developing a new joystick control and into working with KZCO, an electric valve maker, to come up with a statewide remote control monitor package.

“There are some competitive products out there that have had a lot of warranty claims because of corrosion, moisture impregnation into the electronics and related problems,” Carringer said. “We decided early on that we needed to get past those issues… We’ve typically not been in the electronics stuff, but we are in it now. It’s been a big watershed event for us.”

He said TFT’s monitors have to work in a rugged environment with hundreds of gallons of water a minute traveling through a spot shared with some pretty sophisticated electronics. “Plus,” he said, “they’re stuck to a fire truck or a fire boat, which is a pretty tough place to be, exposed to brackish water, foam and all kinds of other stuff.”

In the past 18 months, TFT has developed a new interchangeable remote-control system for its four lines of monitors:

• The Tornado for brush truck and similar apparatus flowing 500 gpm.

• The Hurricane which flows up to 1,250 gpm suitable for most pumper applications.

• The Monsoon, a 4-inch monitor capable of flowing up to 2,000 gpm for a variety of applications, including industrial uses.

• And a soon-to-be released Typhoon monitor, capable of high flows with a special design for aerial applications.

All four of the monitors use radio frequency (RF) remote-control devices, as well as tethered systems, giving the firefighters and engineers the ability to flow water to precise targets with the touch of buttons and without having to climb on top of trucks.

“With [radio frequency] control,” Carringer said, “you are completely free to walk around to the front of the apparatus, or to the back, or wherever and see exactly where you are flowing water.”

It was no easy trick for the TFT staff to get electronics to work reliably with high flow water in the hostile fireground environment.

“We tried to think of, and solve, problems before the firefighters even knew they had them,” says Bob Steingass, TFT’s director of research, one of the engineers instrumental in bringing the remote controls to TFT’s monitors.

McMillan said the remote controls were designed as a package so everything would be the same on all the monitors as far as electronics and motors.

“Sealing the units against moisture has been a big problem with monitors,” he said. “Fire trucks are going out and getting cold and they come back in and get warmed up, so there’s a lot of condensation build up. That’s tough on electronics. We’ve developed a way to seal the units and prevent that air exchange to prevent condensation.”

Developing those technologies has taken TFT into uncharted waters, including explorations into plastics. For instance, McMillan said some plastics are hydroscopic, in that they actually absorb water. Plastics also expand and contract tremendously, as much as an eighth of an inch over a five-inch span creating a gap plenty big enough to let in a lot of water, said Dave Kolacz, TFT’s design engineer.

“The stronger the plastic the bigger the problems you have,” he said. “Ironically, the plastics that have the highest impact strengths have the worst water problems.” To overcome that issue, he said TFT developed a housing comprised of two nylon pieces mated together to create a waterproof container for the monitor electronics.

Even the motors that drive the gears to move the monitors received special attention with a TFT designed custom housing.

Waterproof Motors

“We spent months looking for a waterproof motor that someone had already made, but we found that every vendor used some sort of hand-applied goop to make it waterproof, and that wasn’t good enough for us,” Kolacz said. “We quickly learned that was going to be a dead end.”

The company designed a special screw-on cap, fitted with a high-pressure o-ring that keeps the monitor drive motors sealed without any goop.

“Is it overkill? Probably, but we don’t want any problems,” Steingass said.

TFT also uses a special kind of wire, he said, that should it get nicked or abraded by accident, water will not wick into it and eventually into the electronic components. He said the wire used by TFT is filled with a gel that seals the cut and keeps out the water.

Sealing Water Out

And, if that’s not enough, the control wires are encased in high-grade air hose that seals out water and condensation, according to Steingass.

TFT makes two kinds of remote controls for its monitors – one with a tethered system hardwired to the apparatus and another that uses radio frequency (RF). Both the tethered and RF remotes operate the same way – with directional buttons or a joystick.

“Training is hard enough, and we didn’t want the buttons to be in a different orientation, or different sizes or different configurations,” Steingass said.

The RF control box is machined from a solid aluminum billet for extra strength and weatherproofing.

Because the controller has to be used by firefighters with gloved hands, the unit is large, about 6 inches square, with large buttons.

“If you have to take your gloves off, it’s no good,” said Steingass.

“With this, you don’t want it to get lost, or tossed in someone’s pocket and end up missing. This thing is not going to get lost.”

Like the monitor motors, the RF control box uses high-pressure o-rings to create a watertight seal. The controller’s battery box – it runs on two AA batteries – is also sealed with o-rings.

The remote monitors have a position feedback feature so that each TFT monitor knows exactly where it is positioned at all times in relation to other equipment and firefighters on the apparatus.

The control board can be programmed with “hard stops” so the operator cannot swivel the monitor into the side of the apparatus or stow it improperly. It also learns the location of obstructions, such as firefighters, in its path, by stopping when it encounters resistance, much like a garage door opener.

Each monitor has three communications boards, one that controls horizontal position, one for vertical position and a third to control the nozzle moving it from straight stream to fog or to flush if so equipped.

Position feedback is accomplished by monitoring the revolutions of the motors’ armatures so that with each turn, the monitor knows positionally where it is at all times.

Positioning Speed Control

That feature also permits speed control, McMillan said, explaining that firefighters have the option of speeding up the positioning of monitor and slowing it down to fine tune its position to better hit the target.

“You want speed to swivel it around to get it pointed in the right direction, but you want to go real slow when you get close to where you want to be,” McMillan said. “If you move a couple of degrees too far either way, it makes a big difference 300 feet away and you’re suddenly way off target.”

Competitive products have variable-speed controls as well, but McMillan contended that TFT does it with more precision.

“Everybody else just puts more voltage to the motors and hope it changes the speed,” he said. “What we’re doing is giving it some voltage, checking the position and adjusting the voltage to make sure the speed is constant.”

That’s important, he explained, because monitors react differently in warm weather as opposed to cold. Also, truck voltage can change, depending on the loads placed on it, which could affect monitor speed.

Position feedback also allows TFT monitors to be programmed to repeat sweeping actions from side to side, or up and down.

“We could program a 20-step move in one of these things, and it would repeat it day in and day out, doing the same pattern over and over,” McMillan said.

The value of the feature, he said, is firefighters can program – on the scene – patterns to help fight particular fires. For instance, a bumper turret could be programmed to sweep from side to side as an apparatus advances through a wildfire, McMillan said.

“You could write your name in the snow with one of these,” quipped Steingass.

Wired For 12 And 24 Volts

TFT remote-controlled monitors are designed to run on 12 or 24 volts and, from an installation perspective, a mistake can be made and the positive and the negative wiring can be crossed without frying the electronics.

“If you hook it up backwards, it won’t work, but it won’t hurt anything,” McMillan said. “We decided you shouldn’t have to deal with shorting out boards because you made a mistake.”

TFT has also made a number of improvements to the waterway designs of its monitors under the guidance of Kolacz, the design engineer. The company has been able to tweak the water pathways for the least friction loss and best geometry to keep the monitors low profile while giving maximum range and flow ratings.

TFT figures it will not be long before the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) get involved with requirements that firefighters stay off the top of apparatus. And Carringer said the company wants to be ahead of that curve.

“I really think that with trucks getting taller, trucks getting longer, it doesn’t make sense for people to crawl across hose beds, in the day or night, in slippery and wet conditions,” he said. “We will push it because we think it’s the right thing to do.”

For information about TFT call 800-348-2686 or go to www.tft.com.