The American Gas Association (AGA) continues in its efforts to ensure the use of natural gas in the US is as safe as it is clean and economical, saying “safety is the core value for America's natural gas utilities.” According to the AGA, the industry actively looks for ways to support its longstanding record of safely and reliability in delivering natural gas to homes and businesses across the nation, through legislation, industry best practices, peer reviews, infrastructure enhancements, modernized pipeline materials, and R&D.
Last week, Senet, provider of the largest public, SLA-backed, carrier-grade LoRaWAN network in the US announced they have been working with New Cosmos USA, Inc to roll out the New Cosmos Natural Gas Alarm, designed for utility companies to easily install and monitor for potential gas leaks, and quickly alerts residents to dangerous situations.
New Cosmos USA is owned by New Cosmos Electric Co., Ltd., which has a 70% market share in the residential natural gas alarm market in Japan and has sold more than 70 million residential natural gas alarms worldwide.
The companies are engaged in field trials with large multi-utility service providers to explore use cases focused on improving safety levels and reliability across regional natural gas distribution networks.
By addressing site connectivity challenges and delivering state-of-the-art sensing and alerting features, Senet’s announcement said, “this collaboration is strongly positioned to deliver on the needs of utilities, state regulators, and other natural gas stakeholders who are increasingly focused on using emerging technologies and implementing cost-effective best practices to address the safety, reliability, efficiency, and deliverability of an aging infrastructure.”
Features of the New Cosmos 806NLR Wireless Natural Gas Alarm include a 10% Lower Explosive Limit (LEL) gas alarm threshold, far exceeding the industry standard of alarming at 25% LEL and capable of alerting residents to an emergency situation much sooner than traditional technologies, an 85dB alarm warning sound and instructive voice warnings, and wireless communication to the Utility company for early warning and event response preparation on the Senet LoRaWAN network.
An important feature is also the long-life battery operation (for a minimum of 6 years), allowing for flexible, wireless installation options anywhere in the home.
“We are proud to offer the most reliable, nuisance-resistant alarm solution for dangerous residential gas leak explosions,” said Ron Lazarus, COO at New Cosmos USA. “The ability to expand our reach with Senet’s carrier-grade network services, built on the open LoRaWAN protocol, is an exciting and cost-effective way for our utility partners to continue modernizing many aspects of the gas delivery system, including early leak detection and alerting for rapid response.”
“Unlike lesser featured LoRaWAN network services designed to deliver IoT connectivity, Senet has implemented all the carrier-grade components essential to ensuring the operation of critical infrastructure and essential business applications in utility, municipal and enterprise markets, said Bruce Chatterley, CEO at Senet. “We look forward to a successful partnership with New Cosmos to help deliver new levels of safety and service to the natural gas market.”
Compared to commonly decentralized IoT networks and proprietary utility networks, Senet provides utilities with options for public, private and semi-private carrier-grade network deployment and network operation. With a Senet network in place for gas leak detection, utilities can easily add network capacity and coverage to enhance operations and expand their service offerings to include other gas safety and service delivery solutions on the same IoT network.
Juhi Fadia is an engineer, analyst, researcher and writer covering advanced and emerging technologies.Edited by
Maurice Nagle
