Nick Toussaint
Plummer
Principal
Nick has 38 years of experience addressing thousands of electrical and control systems in service worldwide. He has provided complete services from initial concept and master planning through design, implementation, startup, and commissioning.
His "Hands-On" experience in the configuration of SCADA, telemetry, and PLC-based systems gives him the unique ability to assist owners and systems integrators in solving difficult control systems problems.
For much of his career, Nick has provided instrumentation and control designs and QA/QC for municipal water and wastewater systems in the Rocky Mountain Region, as well as in Texas and Florida. Nick resides in Denver, Colorado.
Presentations
City of Round Rock, Texas Future Proofs IT’s SCADA System: Successes in Modernizing a WTP SCADA and Telemetry System
The City of Round Rock, Texas owns and operates a 52 MGD water treatment facility, located just North of Austin, Texas. The operation centers control over 45 remote sites, including raw water storage, pumping pressure zones, and elevated storage tanks, as well as the treatment facility. The Plant has been expanded over the years with several phases of pretreatment, filtration, chemical feed, and high and low zone pumping systems, and the control system has been added on during each phase, but largely consisted of older Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) processors with multiple remote Input/Output (I/O) racks. Parts for these PLC systems were beginning to become a challenge, and the proprietary architecture meant a single processor failure could affect many processes. The Human Machine Interface (HMI) also was beginning to show its age, and the annual software license costs were becoming prohibitive, and operations staff were longing for a more user-friendly and efficient graphics system that was easier to navigate.