A state-of-the-art casino and world leader in "smart" or "coinless" gambling needs equally revolutionary technology to ensure its backup electrical power supply attains the highest levels of reliability.
The Carnival City Casino near Springs has made significant investments to ensure that essential systems remain operational during a mains power failure, the most recent being a custom-designed, four component uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system to cover the most critical loads.
Designed, installed and commissioned by Square One Power Solutions, the UPS specialist in information and communications technology (ICT) company, the JSE-listed Square One Solutions Group, the UPS system contract was worth more than R1 million.
The contract follows a similar installation by Square One Power Solutions for the Sun International head office data centre, where a system made up of two APC Silcon 120kW units was designed and commissioned recently. Data from Carnival City slot machines regarding mystery jackpots, links to the Dream Machine and other relevant statistical information is fed into the Sun International data centre through a data network.
The Carnival City system consists of four 160kW APC Silcon UPS units installed in a parallel redundancy configuration. Each is capable of carrying 35% of the total critical load at the casino which means that one of the units can be down at any time and the critical load is more than covered by the remaining three units.
"With this configuration we are assured of power supply being maintained to our data centre and IT servers, the CCTV security system, emergency lighting, the smart card sections of the 1 750 electronic slot and video poker machines, the restaurant and bar tills, the complex business management system for heating and air conditioning and the automatic control for the step loading of the major power loads," said the Carnival City Complex Engineer, Theo Pretorius.
"These critical loads, as well as safety and security related loads such as the automatic fire door controls, which are most important to allow people out, can be maintained by the UPS system for at least 15 minutes. Our diesel generator standby power generation system starts within 60 seconds of a mains failure and we therefore have some margin for error."
Utility power supply has been unreliable over the past two years, according to Pretorius, and during that time Carnival City's standby generators ran a total of 150 hours. "We needed to improve the reliability of our backup system, particularly as the original UPS system lost the load on numerous occasions. So we briefed a number of suppliers and asked them to table recommendations."
Pretorius said the submissions were all competitive but the differentiation was Square One Power Solutions' ability to quickly respond to a casino emergency when a unit changeover was required in the early hours of the morning, and to offer a full fault alerting system as part of the solution.
"When things are going well there's not much to separate the suppliers; it's when things go wrong that you get the true measure of who you are dealing with. Square One's rapid response to my cry for help before we were even doing formal business together was a major factor. Carnival City operates 24 hours a day every day. I need to be able to sleep at night and with Square One Power Solutions I have peace of mind."
The installation and connection of the new UPS system to the Carnival City power reticulation system was carried out in such a way that critical loads were not interrupted. Housekeeping routines include simulated mains failure tests that make the 10-year-life UPS battery support packs carry load, and full testing of the three standby power generator sets (two rated at 1600kVA and one at 1 250kVA) is carried out every two weeks.
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