Arosa AroSmoke

The AroSmoke was designed to provide early warning of combustion events that are hidden inside bales of cotton, bales of hay, or piles of seed. In other words, its “sniffer” would make any top notch hound dog jealous. A central unit continuously pulls air through a small plastic pipe that can be run hundreds of feet through a bale storage warehouse near the ceiling. At specified points along this plastic pipe, holes are drilled to allow air sampling. When this central unit detects combustion particles in the air sample, it sounds an alarm to alert warehouse personnel. This makes verifying proper operation an easy task as the sensing unit is at ground level, convenient to access.

The AroSmoke has two levels of sensitivity, low and high. When the system detects forklift traffic, low sensitivity is automatically selected. This is to avoid nuisance alarms from normal warehouse operations. After a delay following this activity, the AroSmoke automatically activates its high sensitivity mode to more closely monitor for combustion in the bales.

The AroSmoke cannot pinpoint the location of the problem bale other than the bounds of the area that its pipe network is monitoring, but its sensitivity provides plenty of early warning that there is something to be concerned about in a specified warehouse. A single AroSmoke unit can protect warehouses larger than 20,000 square feet. As monitored area is increased, response time can be expected to slow down significantly (up to 30-40 minutes in some cases). We recommend planning the AroSmoke installation with the goal of being able to better locate problem bales within large areas.