Wood Grain Elevator Camera System

[thefarmshow 0]

Well I have spent a week cleaning grain up here in this elevator, and I am sick of going up and down to check certain things, especially the cleaner! The elevator is 85 ft to the peak, so a fair amount of cable would be needed for the upper part.

 

A Video to watch if you want to help design a system for me.

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWQrh7_LAlg

 

I will break this down simply for everyone.

 

The main floor consists of:

The office - main switch board is to control things, but manual controlling of bin gates is still required.

The driveway, where trucks unload/load

The back/front pit, this is where grain is dumped

The annex, comp, and elevator and the main houses where the grain bins are. Annex being the furthest, comp being the second furthest, and elevator being the closest/tallest structure.

 

So I am wanting to run, a 8 or 16 channel system, with that many camera's, must be night vision, as the bins are generally dark. I need to be able to use solid pieces of wire, IE no splices of 50ft chunks, so I need to be able to add my own connectors to the wire for each camera , and buy a big roll of wire.

 

My main plan is to wire the cleaning floor, which is three stories up, with 4 cameras to monitor the drum, the feed level, the dirty grain bin level, and the monitor the flops incase they plug.

Then mount another camera right up beside the cleaner to watch the loading spout for semi's.

 

Other cameras up top would be to monitor the two drag units, make sure they are infact turning as we have no indicators below. Another set of cameras to perhaps go inside the distributors, to see if they are infact set to the proper bins, but that would be tricky, as they would have to be inside, and it gets dusty inside, so cleaning of the lenses would be needed. Bin monitoring isnt necessary, though it would be nice, but there is over 50 bins so that is impossible to do.

 

I know this is complicated but if anyone is interested in helping me pick a good 16 channel system that I could install, the video is well worth the watch, though boring to some maybe, I thought itd be helpful.

 

One concern I have though is, everything in the elevator is "explosion proof" because dust can be explosive under severe conditions, though we usually never let it get like that, So I am unsure how we would go about that, usually it just requires an explosion proof plug in, but if I could eliminate any connectors, and solid wire in these cameras I wouldnt have to worry.

 

Thanks for everyone who read this!