Should You Use Wireless Vibration Sensors?

Thinking of using a wireless vibration sensor?

I was thinking of what a senior consultant that I met recently said. He said that wireless vibration sensors is a fad that will likely die after a few years. What made his comment interesting is that his company manufactures and sells wireless vibration sensors. He pointed out that the wireless vibration sensor by itself is low cost but the cost of ownership, of maintaining and supporting its use (you know stuff like cybersecurity measures and data privacy compliances) are actually not cheap.

I do not know if wireless vibration sensors are actually a fad. I do like them because like everyone else I like the no cable thing. Cables can be messy and costly to lay. However, if we are thinking in terms of a one time outlay yes, a wireless vibration sensor is really super affordable.

Cable Assembly for Wired Vibration Sensor

However, thinking long term wise a wired vibration sensor has MTBF of >20 years. When you compare that to the cost of a wireless vibration sensor that is likely to break down in half the time then a wired vibration sensor is not as expensive as you think. The real killer though for wireless vibration sensors is the cost of data storage.

The cost of the wireless vibration sensor is low but you may end up with high data storage cost particularly if you want to monitor the asset more than one a day (can you imagine the data accumulating as time goes by?). One customer, a power station, decided to scrap their wireless vibration sensors after a few years because the data storage was getting to be expensive. This is because this customer wanted to collect the data once every hour. Since they are a power station and any unexpected downtime is a big no, it stands to reason that they want to monitor the asset more than once a day.

I heard that some vendors of wireless vibration sensors say that monitoring once a day is sufficient. Well, if I were them I would say the same too. It would not be good for me to advocate using them to monitor too many times a day. I wouldn't want my customer to be inconvenienced by having to change the battery (or in same cases having to change the whole sensor) and see that the cost of changing batteries once too often can hurt the bottom line.

I recently read somewhere that wireless vibration sensors are designed not so much by people with experience in sensor design but by companies whose core business is designing cloud platform. I did some informal research and some of the issues raised in this article hits the spot. It raised some good issues relating to sensor design that could result in GIGO. This is something I had not thought of but then no vendor in their right mind would shoot their own foot by telling you about these issues or maybe they are not even aware of it. This is why as my momma would say education is important.

One customer once asked me if they can get the data that goes to the wireless vibration sensor manufacturer's cloud platform backed up into their company server. Yes, it could be done via API. However, my engineer back then asked who would make the API. He pointed out that if the manufacturer decided to tweak their platform the API could stop working and it could be a lot of work to get it up and running. Would the customer pay for this? Good question which raises another implication - what if the manufacturer decides to shut down their wireless vibration sensor business?

If the wireless vibration sensor is part of a division in a multinational company then they may keep the cloud working for some time but would they keep running it forever? What if the entire company's business is just selling subscription, cloud analysis and wireless vibration sensors? If the company were to shutter suddenly would their cloud platform still be running? What happens to the data? What happens to the monitoring of the assets?

A wired vibration sensor is old school, not hip, not the in-thing for Industrial 4.0, however, the data goes to your own software so you never have to worry about anything happening to your data. If you are worried about something happening to the software manufacturer, then design your own software. Sounds difficult? Maybe, but not impossible. Some of our customers have designed their own software. Or we could make the software for you. In this way you own the software and the data.

If you are using a wireless vibration sensor and something happens to the manufacturer you cannot use the sensor to send the data to another cloud storage or even to your own software. This is a problem you will never encounter with a traditional wired vibration sensor. Tradition is not attractive, not hip but if you use a wired vibration sensor you can send the data via a monitoring system to a cloud or a server with little hassle. You always own your data and never be held hostage by subscription plans or cloud storage costs.

You know what I think? I think a wireless vibration sensor is more suitable for a balance of plant asset than a critical asset. This is because if you have a machine that must never, ever shut down suddenly would you not want to monitor it 24/7, 365 days? After all, a critical asset that experiences a catastrophic breakdown not only causes the company to lose money. In some cases it can lead to regulatory fines, payment of penalties to customers and earn a bad reputation for inconveniencing the users. I remember being told that in an upstream petrochemical plant if they have a sudden shutdown it will affect seven other customer's plants downstream. That's one hell of a loss.

So where do we go from here?

Should a customer go for a wireless vibration sensor? Absolutely! The best way to learn about the pros and cons of a wireless vibration sensor is to actually use it.

However, if for whatever reason you are considering using the old reliable wired vibration sensor contact us at sales@vibration.company as we offer customizable vibration monitoring systems that are affordable, easy to maintain, no subscription fees to pay, never have to change batteries and which you can expect to use for a long, long time. Made in Austria, our systems are super fast and suitable for Big Data, Machine Learning if you have an AI-based software you want to train or use it with a Digital Twin software.