Vanderbilt Access Control & Emergency Power Supply with
Voltage-in-Parallel Solution and Controller Redundancy
Medical administration office with 150+ employees, Frankfurt am Main
- Office building with over 150 employees
- 32 Door controllers
- 13 Power Supplies – Voltage-in-Parallel Redundancy
- Up to 7 days emergency power supply
- Cold standby for main controller
- Switching time of the main controller <20 seconds
- Owner can manage employees himself and create new cards
- Conversion during operation! Downtime of <1 minute!
- Access control from Siemens-Vanderbilt
The topic of emergency power supply is unfortunately too often neglected by many owners of an electronic system. It does not matter whether it is the in-house server room, the alarm system or the access control system. In our projects the redundancy of a system is always considered with great importance. In this way, we can guarantee the customer that even in the event of a deliberate power failure or technical defect, the most important functions of his system or building will still function.
One of our newest customers is now benefiting from this. Imagine a larger office building with about 150 employees, each exterior and department door electronically secured, with different areas and authorizations for each individual employee and two elevators, which also only work with the contactless access control authorization cards.
Due to power supply failures in his previous access control system, our customer had a total failure of the door control in the meantime. The reason for this was that originally no adequate emergency power supply was planned, the power supply units of the door controllers were permanently overloaded and the door control of the entire building collapsed. So the customer turned to us with an emergency to solve his problem – as quickly as possible. In the meantime, the entrances to the building were guarded by a security company with security staff – and that cost the customer a lot of money. Our technicians were able to get the system up and running again with a quick, temporary repair. “But we can’t leave the system in this condition,” we told our customer. So the customer commissioned us to convert his access control system to the latest state of the art – and even more…
Within a very short time we have managed to achieve a technical miracle. We have developed what may be the world’s first redundant low-voltage power supply with 13 power supply units connected in parallel and supplying 32 door controllers with power. Furthermore, we were able to make our newly won customer even happier when we casually gave him the operating time in emergency power mode: 7 days! This is enough time to turn to us as a trusted security company in the event of problems. Even with up to two defective power supply units, the intelligent system would detect the failure and automatically take over the power supply from the surrounding power supply units through the parallel connection.
To increase the reliability of the Haauptcontroller, which manages the 32 door controllers, a second main controller was installed in cold standby mode. This means that in the event of a fault (e.g. a defect in the first main controller), the entire system is switched over to the second main controller by manual switching. This means that the door controllers are ready for operation again within less than 20 seconds and access can be reliably controlled again – even without time-critical intervention by a technician.
During the conversion, the system had to continue to function – which is why we decided to carry out a parallel conversion while the system was running. The customer and his employees, for example, had almost no notice of the conversion, except for a one-minute failure when the new main controller was reconnected.
During the inspection of the data lines connecting the individual door controllers, we also noticed a faulty way of wiring during the conversion work. Our customer told us that in the past there had always been short access control failures of a few minutes. Neither the customer nor his former security technology provider could give a reason for this.
We corrected the faulty wiring – since then the access control system has been running without any failures. We are proud to say that our customer is extremely satisfied with his new system and has recommended us to his closest business partners ever since. With our careful and sustainable project planning and installation, we were again able to convince a new customer of us as a premium service provider for security technology.
