In the interest of saving energy and your wallet, most of you have been using a programmable thermostat for several years. A not uncommon, but more annoying issue is that the touch cells could stop working at any time; you will then no longer be able to adjust the time or schedule a particular period. You can press all the buttons you want, flex your descriptive vocabulary, but the thermostat will still ignore you. Other than that little detail, the thermostat will work perfectly.
Jack Chopper serves as a Senior Controls Engineer for Filamatic, a Packaging Machinery OEM. Jack loves technology, and particularly enjoys unstructured problems. Jack can be reached at: jack.chopper@filamatic.com
When trying to replace the thermostat, it’ll come as no surprise that the same model is no longer available. You’ll try to find a comparable one with the same mix of features, but be incredibly unsuccessful. There will be several models that come close, but none will have the entire feature set that you long for… One common thread is that most programmable thermostats are now WIFI enabled… so, if you haven’t already done so, say hello to the Internet of Things (IoT).
Enter stage left… manufacturing and industrial control systems, it’s obvious that the IoT has had an impact here too. Many devices are now present on a network rather than serving in a standalone role. Component lifecycles are astonishingly short. And for those who love flexibility and feature-laden items, we now have control devices where it takes more time to disable the features we don’t want, than it does to properly configure the ones we do. Fight it or embrace it, the IoT is here, and it will be for the foreseeable future.
As your liquid filling partner, our job is to offer liquid filling solutions that meet your immediate production needs while also providing a clear path forward for your equipment’s technological growth. As a customer, you should expect and demand that your vendors avoid hype and offer you cost-effective, value-rich solutions… end-deliverables that simply don’t list features, but instead shows you how to use them to make your operations more effective. That’s the goal, isn’t it?