Most oil leaks are discovered on inspection rounds — hours or days after they started, once the oil has spread, soaked and reached somewhere expensive. Contact-based detection is not much better: the leak has to physically travel to the sensing cable before anything happens.

• Specified detection time of 3 seconds from a hydrocarbon film appearing on the monitored surface.
• Detection at the source: mounted over the likely leak point (under a connection, over a drip tray), it triggers while the leak is still a film — not a pool.
• The alert chain is immediate: the base unit fires email, SNMP traps and optional SMS the moment the status flips to WET.

What that buys you: the difference between wiping a tray and remediating a contaminated plant room — or between a topped-up day tank and a genset that fails to start during the outage it exists for.

Traditional hydrocarbon leak detection relies on sensing cables or spot probes that must absorb the oil to detect it. That design has a built-in cost: once wetted, the sensing element is contaminated and typically has to be replaced — every detection event is also a purchase order and a site visit.

• The optics never touch the oil: the sensor detects from above, so a leak event does not degrade or contaminate it.
• After the event: clean up the spill and the sensor reports DRY again — monitoring continues with the same hardware.
• No consumables budget: no replacement cables, no re-commissioning after each event, no dead zones while spares are on order.
• Testable: the sensor can be verified without sacrificing a sensing element.

Mount the sensor above the surface where a leak would first appear, up to 10cm / 3.9in away, on the wall, floor or ceiling — the IP65 rated enclosure is built for the dirty, hot corners where oil systems live.

Typical Applications

• Backup generators & day tanks: under fuel connections, pumps and filters — the leak that matters most is the one that empties the tank before the outage.
• Fuel pipe runs & filling points: at joints, valves and transfer points along the route.
• Drip trays & bunded areas: watching the tray or bund floor turns passive containment into an active alarm.
• Hydraulic power units & oil-filled equipment: anywhere a slow seep today becomes a failure next quarter.

Application Guide

The sensor plugs into the base unit over a single RJ45 cable carrying data and power, and reports a clear WET/DRY status.

• Standalone alerting: the base unit fires email, SNMP traps and optional SMS on a WET event — no PC or software required.
• BMS integration: the status is published over Modbus TCP, BACnet IP and Modbus RTU — availability depends on the base unit model.
• NMS & DCIM integration: SNMP, including traps.
• Industrial IoT: MQTT, on the BASE-6 generation base unit.
• RS-485 native version: integrates directly with your own gateway or controllers, bypassing the base unit entirely.