Copper Stealing

[Daniel Bui]

Hi All,

Just wondering if there is anything technically we can do to stop copper stealing on the freeways?

http://www.staradvertiser.com/newspremium/20120502__Public_asked_to_be_on_watch_after_attempt_to_steal_copper.html?id=149790535

Daniel

[Matt Berry]

Add more voltage? Lol

Rig the access with voltage?

I'm sure it'd be fairly simple to rig some sort of power monitoring circuit so if it's broken it alerts. But the false positive rate could be so high I doubt they'd send an HPD cruiser to check it out.

Then the cost of another monitoring system...it would need to be something that could tie into current systems. Anybody have insight into the DOT systems?

-- Matt Berry

[Alan Solidum]

I think on the 5th episode of History Channel's Invention USA, someone
was trying to get them to invest in an invention that attempts to
solve this problem. Basically they pressurize the pipe and if there's
a break in the system, their device turns on an alarm. The other
benefit is that it can be used to determine if there any leaks in the
system.

They called their product the "Copper Cop"

On May 2, 7:09 am, Daniel Bui <buckyhead2...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Just wondering if there is anything technically we can do to stop copper
> stealing on the freeways?
>

> http://www.staradvertiser.com/newspremium/20120502__Public_asked_to_b...
>
> Daniel

[Daniel Bui]

You may be on to something. Would placing a vibration sensor every 50 feet work?

[David Cornejo]

I think the biggest problem is not technology but the scale and
manpower involved in monitoring and responding to alarms. This stuff
is very similar to my work, and police like doctors HATE false
positives and will stop responding at some point. Just as big a
problem is that the PD doesn't exactly put property theft at the top
of their priority list, so by the time they respond the crooks are
long gone.

Technologically, it's a real interesting problem because of the scale
of the problem - one source claims that there are 2700 miles of urban
improved road - at one sensor every fifty feet you have over 270K
sensors to cover this much road (~100/mile) and then you need to
connect those back to a common point (the HECO meter?) and from the
common point to a monitoring center. To avoid a parallel wired
network (more $s for the crooks!) you could use power line
communication. I thought I saw a power line interface implemented as
an Arduino shield somewhere so you could make a master that polls a
bunch of slaves every couple of hundred ft down the line for quite
cheap.

[Robert S Brewer]

One also has to consider the cost of a copper theft protection system
compared to the cost of dealing with actual copper thefts.

--
Robert Brewer
http://excitedcuriosity.wordpress.com/
https://www.facebook.com/kukuicup

[David Cornejo]

true.

[RogerI...@aol.com]

Regarding the detection of thefts of copper wire from the light fixtures along our highways.

 

Decades ago I worked at a government R&D lab and part of their security system included a device which, attached to their computer network, could detect any "disturbances" along the wires (this was pre-fiber optic), such as unauthorized connections or cuts, and could pinpoint within inches where the connection or cut appeared.

 

So I'm thinking a similar device could simply be attached to one end of the power lines and it should be easy to detect when and pinpoint where the wires are being cut.

 

- Roger Garrett

 

[Matthew Berry]

i think we have something built on the same tech at work. i can hook it into a strand of cable and it will tell me where the break/short is. its pretty accurate. over 100ft its within 2 ft.

i forget what its called right now, but fluke makes it.

[David Cornejo]

Time domain reflectometer

[Matthew Berry]

YES! THAT!

aka "that fluke thingy that tells me where the wire is broke!"

[Jeremy Chan]

This sounds like an awesome PhD topic, a novel method of performing time domain reflectometry over live power transmission lines for anti copper theft systems :)

Heck, powerline networking was able to superimpose signals on 120VAC, why not TDR pulses too right?  But instead of a single or dual hi frequency pulse, perhaps a modulated PRN sequence of high frequency pulses could be injected on the AC waveform, and a TDR profile of all reflections can be made.  Then the data could be position correlated within power distribution wiring blueprints or maybe even by manually introducing impedance mismatches while the circuits are tuned off.  Might be a whole bunch of secondary reflections between readings though.

If this could actually work, you could potentially monitor a ton of wire at once.  Who here needs a doctorate degree?  :)

Jeremy