Should I use a Robertshaw Vibraswitch or Vibration Monitor/Transmitter?
This depends on the type of protection you desire. A Vibraswitch will protect you from catastrophic failure by shutting a machine down before excessive damage is incurred, and before it can do harm to nearby personnel (i.e., a fan blade dislodges and causes injury, or possibly death, to an employee). A Vibraswitch will not, however, give you advanced notice of an impending or a generating problem. To provide you with advanced notice, a Monitor or Stud Mount Accelerometer/Transmitter is needed. These instruments both deliver a 4-20 mADC output. Charting this information output can reveal gradual increases in vibration which indicate that maintenance will be required sometime in the near future. Armed with this information, you can schedule preventative maintenance before a catastrophic failure occurs — failure which might otherwise prove much more costly and/or occur during a peak production period for that machine, when you can hardly afford downtime. By recording and trending the 4-2
