JPH08285277A - Repair work supporting system for gas appliance - Google Patents

Abstract

PURPOSE: To quickly and accurately estimate the cause of a generated failure, and at the same time facilitate the analysis of the cause by a method wherein repair result information of a gas appliance is stored in a failure analyzing device for one time and the stored repair result information is stored in a memory device of a service center of the gas appliance, after the completion of the repair. CONSTITUTION: When a gas appliance 21 is repaired, the inspection of a related area, the confirmation of a motion, the checking of voltage/current, etc., are performed in order by using a failure analyzing device 3 such as a hand held computer, etc., and the cause of the failure is judged. Then, an estimation for the repair cost is prepared, and presented to the user. At this time, when the state of a specific area of the gas appliance 21 is stored as an image depending on the content of the repair, the actual state of the specific area is photographed by a CCD camera 4, and the image data is stored in an internal memory 34 of the failure analyzing device 3. Then, the failure analyzing device 3 is connected to a telephone 22, and the repair result information and data are transmitted to a host computer 11 at a service center 1 through a telephone circuit 10, and are stored in a memory 12.

Description

Detailed Description of the Invention

[0001]

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION 1. Field of the Invention The present invention relates to a gas equipment repair / construction support system for assisting repair / construction workers in repairing or constructing gas equipment such as a gas water heater.

[0002]

2. Description of the Related Art When a gas water heater, a gas fan heater, a gas room air conditioner, or other gas equipment has been used for many years, it may cause ignition failure due to aged deterioration of parts, change in usage condition, or electrical connection failure. It may cause various malfunctions such as a decrease in firepower or the disappearance of flames.

In such a case, the user of the gas appliance informs a service center in the area of the occurrence of the failure by telephone,
Request inspection and repair. At the service center that received the call, the user hears the model name of the gas equipment, the location of the failure, and the status of the failure from the user, writes it on a prepared work sheet, and specifies the due date of the repair.

Before going out to repair gas equipment, a repair worker obtains technical information necessary for the work from instruction manuals, construction manuals, technical data, etc., and predicts a failure location based on the information heard from the user. Then, replacement parts are prepared, and if necessary, a drawing that records the installation status of the gas equipment at the site is copied, and then it is sent to the site.

[0005] In the field, a place which is considered to be the cause of failure of the failed gas equipment is inspected, and if it is an electrical abnormality, it is inspected using a tester or the like and as a result, the cause of the failure is accurately grasped. Then estimate the repair cost,
Present it to the user and, after obtaining its consent, start full-scale repair work including parts replacement. Finally, a test run is performed to confirm normal operation of the gas equipment and complete a series of repairs. The repair worker returns to the service center and records the completion of the repair work.

[0006]

By the way, recently, the development cycle of gas appliances has been accelerated, and new and improved products have been on the market one after another, and electrical control has been adopted for gas appliances to improve their functions. There is. For this reason, complicated electric circuits and numerous electric parts have come to be used in gas appliances, and it is conceivable that failures due to these troubles and wiring or connector troubles may occur.

For a failure of a gas appliance caused by such a situation change, even if the repair is once completed, if the failure occurs again due to various reasons or causes, the cause is the previous repair. If there is no relationship, the location of the cause of failure may become unclear. There is also a demand for effectively utilizing the previous failure-related information for the next failure repair.

The present invention has been made in view of the above points, and is a system for repairing and constructing a gas appliance which is effective for quickly and accurately predicting the cause of failure of the gas appliance and facilitating analysis of the cause of the failure. The purpose is to provide.

[0009]

In order to achieve the above-mentioned object, the present invention temporarily stores repair result information of a gas appliance in a failure diagnosis device, and then stores the repair result information in a storage device of a service center of the gas appliance. I decided to store it in.

As a preferred embodiment of the present invention, the failure diagnosis device has a communication function and transmits repair result information of the gas equipment to the service center through a communication line.

[0011]

According to the present invention, the repair result information stored in the service center can be used to quickly and accurately predict the cause of a failure that has occurred thereafter and to easily analyze the cause.

[0012]

DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS The present invention will be described below with reference to the drawings.

FIG. 1 shows the overall construction of a repair construction support system for gas equipment according to the present invention. In FIG. 1, reference numeral 1 denotes a service center that provides comprehensive services to gas consumers in a predetermined area. Here, the gas usage status of the customer is constantly monitored and the gas equipment of the customer is abnormal. We have a system to respond urgently to situations,
Repair workers are also on standby at all times. This service center records and integrates gas usage of customers, calculates gas charges, monitors and analyzes trends in gas consumption within the area, and performs data communication with the outside as described later. A host computer 11 for
As far as the range relevant to the present invention is concerned, the specification data of all the gas appliances used in the service area, the instruction manual, the model of the gas appliance for each customer, the gas usage, the installation of the gas appliance. And data relating to repairs (for example, installation / repair time, site piping diagram, fault location, replacement parts, name of repair worker, etc.) are stored.

On the other hand, 2 is one customer in the area of the service center 1, that is, a user of a gas appliance. In this customer 2, a gas appliance (for example, a gas water heater) 21 is used and a telephone 22 is used. Therefore, the telephone 22 can communicate with the service center 1 through the ordinary public telephone line 10.

Reference numeral 3 denotes a failure diagnosing device which is carried by a repairman and is connected to the gas equipment 21 on site to be used for failure diagnosis. A CCD camera 4 can be connected to the failure diagnosing device 3. .

FIG. 2 schematically shows an example of the configuration of the failure diagnosis device 3.

The failure diagnosis device 3 has almost the same appearance and functions as a well-known handheld computer, and can be connected to the CCD camera 4 by a connector 3a and can be connected to a printer (not shown) by a connector 3b. ing. Further, the characteristic of this failure diagnosis device 3 is that by connecting the connector 3c to the telephone set 22, communication with the host computer 11 of the service center 1 is possible through the public telephone line 10 and necessary data can be exchanged. Is.

On the front panel of the failure diagnosis device 3, in addition to the power button, a failure diagnosis procedure is displayed as a message, and specification data of a gas device to be failed is displayed. 31, a numeric keypad and operation buttons used for mode selection, data input, and communication with the service center 1 are provided.

The circuit configuration of the failure diagnosis device 3 is shown in FIG.
As shown in FIG. 2, the data input unit 32 including the numeric keypad and the operation buttons, and the failure-related information and data input by the repair worker during the failure diagnosis or after the failure diagnosis, or transmitted from the service center 1 when requested. It has a memory 33 for storing the received data, and a control unit 34 composed of a CPU for controlling the operation of the failure diagnosis transmission 3 and the communication with the service center 1.

Next, the operation of the repair construction support system according to the present invention will be described with reference to the repair work of gas equipment.

Although the repair worker has prepared a work sheet prepared in advance at the service center 1, the materials prepared in advance after confirming the failure status again from the user (customer) of the gas equipment at the site. And start repair work based on the data.

In this case, if the materials and data necessary for repair are not available, the failure diagnosis device 3 can be connected to the telephone 22 and the desired data can be obtained from the service center 1 via the public telephone line 10. . When the service center 1 makes this request, the host computer 11 reads the requested data from the memory 12 and transmits it to the failure diagnosis device 3 through the public telephone line 10. The transmitted data is stored in the memory 34 inside the failure diagnosis device 3.

When all the necessary data are collected, the repair worker starts the work according to a predetermined procedure corresponding to the failure situation and finds the cause of the failure. Check related parts, check operation, check for contact failure, voltage /
The cause of the failure can be found by conducting current checks in sequence. The cause of failure may be defective parts. At this stage, the repair worker prepares an estimate of the repair cost based on the cause of the failure and presents it to the user. After the user agrees to this estimate, full-scale repair work is started to eliminate the cause of the failure. Replace parts if necessary. Finally, a test run is performed to confirm that the gas equipment is operating normally and to complete the repair work.

Thereafter, the repair worker operates the ten keys and operation buttons of the failure diagnosis device 3 to identify the user's code number, gas equipment specification, gas equipment status data at the completion of work, failure diagnosis result and repair result. The repair result information and data on predetermined items such as are input to the failure diagnosis device 3. Depending on the content of the repair, if it is judged that it is preferable to save the situation of the specific part of the gas equipment as an image, the CCD camera 4 is connected to the failure diagnosis device 3, and the current state of the specific part is photographed by the CCD camera 4. The video data is also stored in the internal memory 34 of the failure diagnosis device 3 as repair result information. After all the repair result information and data have been input to the failure diagnosis device 3, the repair worker is required to
Is connected to the telephone 22, and the repair result information and data are transmitted to the host computer 11 of the service center 1 via the public telephone line 10 and stored in the memory 12.
This repair result information and data are then stored in the service center 1.

The failure diagnosing device 3 of the above embodiment can input repair result information and data, can temporarily store the information, and transmits the information and data to the host computer 11 of the service center 1 by utilizing its own communication function. In addition to the function, the failure diagnosis device 3 is connected to the gas equipment and the voltage / current value of a predetermined portion of the gas equipment or a temperature sensor or other sensor provided inside the gas equipment is used. It may be provided with an automatic failure diagnosis function of capturing a signal and automatically diagnosing a failure of the gas equipment according to a predetermined sequence using the information. In the case of such a failure diagnosis device having an automatic failure diagnosis function, the sequence for failure diagnosis may be incorporated in the internal memory of the failure diagnosis device itself, or a service center may be accessed through a communication line each time the failure diagnosis work is performed. The data may be transmitted from No. 1 or may be stored in a storage medium such as an IC card and I
Alternatively, the C card may be loaded in the failure diagnosis device and used. By using the failure diagnosis device having such an automatic failure diagnosis function, even a worker who is not very familiar with repairing gas equipment can perform sufficient repair work.

Further, in the above embodiment, since the information and data necessary for the failure diagnosis of the gas equipment were insufficient, the information was transmitted from the service center 1 through the public telephone line 10. In the case of gas equipment, information and data of that kind shall be provided in advance for each model of gas equipment.
If it is stored in the card and prepared, it is enough to bring the IC card suitable for the model to be repaired to the site.

Further, the failure diagnosis device 3 and the service center 1
The data transmission between and is not limited to communication means using the public telephone line 10, but may be wireless communication.

Further, in the present invention, it is important to store and manage the repair result information and repair data after completion of the repair work so as to be useful for subsequent repairs. In addition to the example shown in FIG. 1, the failure diagnosis device does not directly transmit it to the service center 1, but temporarily stores it in a storage medium such as an IC card, and thereafter
It is also possible to adopt a method such as storing after returning.

Although the present invention has been described in the above embodiments in relation to the repair of a gas appliance, the present invention can also be applied to a construction for newly installing a gas appliance.

[0030]

As described above, according to the present invention,
When the trouble repair work of the gas equipment is completed, the information and data obtained as a result of the repair are stored in the storage device, so that the following effects can be obtained. (1) The stored repair result information and data will be useful for the next repair. (2) It is possible to accurately grasp whether or not the cause of the newly generated failure after the failure repair is related to the previous failure repair method. (3) Since the characteristics of the operation pattern and operation pattern of the gas equipment of the user can be understood, it is useful for future development of the gas equipment and reduction of failures. (4) When newly installing and constructing a gas appliance, if there is failure result information of the gas appliance that is already in use, it is useful in designing the installation position and piping. (5) Since all repair information can be obtained by communication,
Immediate response to emergency repairs is also possible.

[Brief description of drawings]

FIG. 1 is an overall configuration diagram of a repair construction support system for gas equipment according to the present invention.

FIG. 2 shows a circuit configuration of a failure diagnosis device used in the present invention.

[Explanation of symbols]

 1 Service Center 11 Host Computer 12 Memory 2 Customer 3 Failure Diagnosis Device 31 Display Section 32 Data Input Section 33 Memory 34 Control Section 4 CCD Camera 10 Public Telephone Line

Front page continued (72) Inventor Koichiro Ito 2-13-7 Midori, Sumida-ku, Tokyo 1109 Urban Heights Ryogoku (72) Inventor Masa Ishimoto 2-11-2 Kajigaya, Takatsu-ku, Kawasaki-shi, Kanagawa Kajigaya Dormitory No. 222 ( 72) Inventor Satoshi Morita 6-9-5 Chuo, Ota-ku, Tokyo Omori Dormitory No. 24

Claims (6)

[Claims] 1. The repair result information of the gas equipment is temporarily stored in the failure diagnosis device, and the repair result information saved in the failure diagnosis device is stored in the storage device of the service center of the gas equipment after the repair is completed. A repair and construction support system for gas appliances. 2. The repair construction support system for gas equipment according to claim 1, wherein the failure diagnosis device has a communication function and is capable of transmitting the repair completion information to the service center via a communication line. 3. The failure diagnosis device is electrically connectable to a gas device, and has an automatic failure diagnosis function of automatically diagnosing a failure of the gas device based on an electric signal output from the gas device. A repair and construction support system for gas equipment as described in. 4. The repair and construction support system for gas equipment according to claim 2, wherein sequence information for executing the automatic failure diagnosis function is transmitted from the service center to the failure diagnosis device via the communication line. 5. The repair / installation support system for gas equipment according to claim 1, wherein the failure diagnosis device can be loaded with a storage medium that stores information necessary for repair and repair of the gas equipment. 6. The repair construction support system for gas equipment according to claim 1, wherein the repair result information of the gas equipment is temporarily stored in a storage medium that can be loaded into the failure diagnosis device.