Service Enhancements – Wintersense Reliable Road Temperature Measurements

At AccuGrit, innovation is at the heart of everything we do and a key pillar in our culture. So even before AccuGrit was launched, the leadership team spent time in the USA (because they have consistent winters so are naturally more progressive) to research plus meet with peers to find out what could be learned and brought back to the UK.

As a result, AccuGrit continues to introduce and successfully implement industry-leading winter maintenance technology such as Wintersense.

As part of a complex winter maintenance contract, the team at AccuGrit were given the challenge to supply cost-effective, trustworthy road temperatures where a traditional road weather outstation at every location of interest wasn’t practical. As a result, the team discovered the Wintersense solution, which revolves around a simple sensor attached to a roadside lighting column for several years’ worth of road surface temperature measurements.

Faster to install, Wintersense all takes several precautions to ensure accurate measurements:

• Over three years of testing, trialling, iterating, and deploying the road temperature sensors to ensure they fit their purpose.
• Significant investment in a sophisticated climate chamber capable of subjecting each sensor to freezing conditions to assess the sensor would remain accurate in deployment.
• As with any infrared road temperature sensor, vehicles can cause errors when blocking the sensor’s view of the road surface. Wintersense software filters out any resulting temperature spikes.
• Once the sensor uploads its data to the cloud servers, it is passed through a variety of quality control checks to flag and alert any suspect data.

Combined with utilising accurate weather forecasting from a company based at the University of East Anglia, plus real-time reporting, AccuGrit can today proudly boast it is making an impact in the industry to help keep premises up and down the UK safe and accessible in winter and continually adding technology to improve the level of service offered to clients.

Contact the team to find out how we can support your business.