You can’t beat a show for ‘kicking the tyres’ – seeing products in the flesh, as it were, and asking about them. That’s what we did at IFSEC 2022 at London Docklands in May, and featured one or two exhibitors in the August print edition of Professional Security Magazine.
You may know of SmartWater for their forensic marking products. You can see their ‘Thieves beware’ signage, for example pictured, on some utilities box not many miles from the IFSEC show floor, in Beckton, east London. What you might not appreciate is that the company has diversified and offers for example the Armadillo. We pictured one last year, in Weston super Mare town centre, while it’s having its street scene redeveloped. And that’s the typical place you may see an Armadillo; also, from early this year, we’ve seen it round Earls Court in west London; and in Birmingham, on regeneration land cleared but not yet built on. Kelvin Danton, South East regional sales manager for PID Systems, the arm of SmartWater, talked us through the product.
Detected
You have a high definition camera; and passive infra-red detectors. The product can be pre-programmed so that if a building site closes for 6pm, the detection comes on at 6.05pm. Say then that in the night someone comes within range of the PIRs – a tight range compared with the perimeter, but the Armadillo is about protecting the high-value assets inside the perimeter. Either trespassers are there to steal the plant; or they’re there to fool about and spray graffiti, but could still do damage to machinery. Once the detectors are triggered, on would come white light and a siren and a warning in an Irish accent (why Irish? the product firm has come to feel that works) sounds that you have been detected and the owner has been informed.
An activation has gone to an alarm receiving centre. If the ARC operator can see that children are playing, that’s usually enough to put off the intruder. If someone’s wearing high-vis, it may be a worker gone back for some legit reason; but wearing high-vis does not mean you’re a site worker. The ARC can make a phone call to the site manager. The Armadillos are in use in ditches for water companies; alongside generators, and pipelines; and at train depots, to combat graffiti on rolling stock. You can rent the product by the week; it can be pinned into the ground. We spoke also to Simon Speight, who’s in charge on the retail side. You can deploy smaller units in store, as an alternative to guarding. The Armadillo could work with other security already in the shop, such as fogging and forensic spray. As an aside, we last featured Simon while he was at Amberstone. His father, Peter, was long in the industry and indeed got a doctorate in security management; he’s since become an award-winning gin-maker.
How to power
The Armadillo’s been a growing part of SmartWater, the company says, and they hope to grow it further. They and others are addressing how to protect a remote or unoccupied site. Two issues are how that on a building site the security unit may have to be portable yet hardy enough to take knocks; and it may need its own power source. The Armadillo is battery-operated and weighs 50kg.
