"Without Your System, We Would Have Had a Disaster"

Drew Hanover

Oct 8, 2025

We caught a scary one this week folks.

At a customer facility, we were monitoring their planer when we detected a stuck board and a rapid increase in temperature to 100 C (212 F). You can see in the video below how the board gets stuck, creating a local hotspot until it finally releases and cools and the saw cools.

The customer was alerted, and no machine damage was detected.

However, only 1 hour later, the customer began receiving alarms on a different camera located in a completely separate location.

This time, the alarm was coming from the ceiling. But why the ceiling? The ceiling, in this case, is full of ducting for the dust extraction systems.

That stuck board earlier? Yeah, the dust extraction system sucked up an ember. The ember traveled through the system until it stuck due to a blockage in the pipe from built up materials. A fire started in the duct, and our camera overseeing the production floor was able to see the hot spot on the duct from 50+ meters away.

We started sending alarms at only 75 C, thanks to our adaptive learning algorithm which learns how to spot temperature anomalies by simply observing the day to day operations.

Less than 1 minute later, temperatures spiked to over 115 C (~240 F). Mind you, this is the heat signature on the outside of a metal duct, 50 meters away from the camera.