What makes this hard
Congested, high-consequence work at height
Boiler furnace internals, FGD absorber spray layers and demisters, turbine cylinders and coal handling steelwork. Access is improvised, anchor points are often in the wrong place for the task, and the consequence of a fall in a cramped plant area is severe.
Outage windows force shortcuts
The unit is off and the clock is running. Low anchorage — a lanyard hooked below the feet — is the classic response to a missing overhead anchor, and it converts a short arrest into a long fall. It is nearly invisible from the ground.
Contractor-heavy, transient workforce
Overhauls bring in large numbers of contractor staff who do not know the plant, work to tight schedules, and are the group most frequently involved in height incidents across the industry.
Supervision is a person with a clipboard
A safety officer cannot watch several simultaneous work fronts. Violations are typically recorded after the fact, if at all, which means no intervention happens at the moment it would have mattered.
What we deploy
Power station work at height happens in short, congested windows — a boiler overhaul where the furnace, the absorber and the coal bunkers are all open at once and several contractors are working inside the same outage.
- SBM2000 array harness monitor on existing harnesses, or SBM3000 where crews use pole straps, fall arresters and double hooks
- On-device edge computing so alarms still reach the worker in areas with no mobile coverage
- Buzzer alarm at the wearer plus SMS, voice call and app notification to the supervisor, safety officer and plant safety platform
- Automatic height detection above 2 m with the barometric calibrator — no manual registration
- BeiDou / GPS positioning for locating a casualty on dense plant steelwork
- Explosion-proof rated Ex ib IIC T4 Gb, IP65 / IP66, for work adjacent to coal handling and FGD areas
What changes on site
Low anchorage becomes visible
The configuration that causes the most serious fall incidents is exactly the one that spot-checking cannot see. Sensor-based detection catches it every time it occurs, not once a month.
Supervision scales beyond headcount
One safety officer can monitor several work fronts through alerts rather than by walking between them, which is the only way coverage keeps pace with a large outage.
Contractors are covered from day one
Harness-mounted units are issued with the harness, so a contractor arriving on site is monitored whether or not they have been briefed on the plant's own procedures.
An audit trail that reflects reality
Time-stamped records of individual harness use and violations for each work front, available for the post-outage review rather than reconstructed from memory.
Frequently asked questions
Can we keep the harnesses we already own?
Yes. The SBM2000 monitor retrofits to existing full-body harnesses and can be installed by your own team, which is how most plants start — one crew and one harness type before wider rollout.
Does it work in areas with no mobile signal?
Detection and the wearer alarm run on the device with no network at all. The remote notifications to supervisors require 4G or a private network connection; where the plant has an internal network, the platform can be deployed on-premise.
How does this fit with our outage contractor induction?
Units are issued with the harness, so monitoring does not depend on the contractor's own procedures. Alert rules and escalation contacts are configured per work front, so outage-management staff receive only the alerts relevant to them.
What happens when an alarm is raised and the worker does not respond?
Alerts escalate through the configured chain — the attendant and supervisor first, then the plant safety platform. Because the wearer's position is also reported, the response does not depend on finding them.