BARCHA HMI — Every controller. Every site. One screen.

The problem

One building. Four vendors. Four ways to look at it.

Most refrigeration estates were not designed — they accumulated. A Copeland rack from the 2019 remodel, a Danfoss pack in the new build, Micro Thermo on the older stores, and a handful of standalone controllers nobody has logged into in years. Each one came with its own software, its own login and its own idea of what an alarm is.

Nobody has the whole picture

Four tools means four tabs, four passwords and no single answer to “is everything cold right now?”

Alarms that go nowhere

A buzzer in an empty rack room at 2 a.m. is not an alarm. Neither is an email nobody owns.

No history when it matters

When a claim, an inspection or a warranty dispute lands, the data is on a controller nobody can export from.

Dashboard tiles. Compressors, suction and discharge, fans, valves, levels and digital status — live, on one screen, in the units your people think in. Every tile animates with the equipment, and clicks through to its trend history.

Alongside what you already have

A small PC in the rack room reading your existing controllers. No wiring changes, no controller reprogramming, and no downtime on the refrigeration while it is commissioned.

Or on its own — as the controller

For stores with no rack controller at all: corner stores, convenience, liquor and grocery. BARCHA I/O boards do the sensing and switching; BARCHA does the control.

Works with the controllers you already run

Copeland E3Copeland E2Danfoss AK-SM 880A Micro Thermo / ParkerModbus TCP & RTU I/OBARCHA Control I/O

At the site

The screen your technicians actually use.

BARCHA runs on a small PC in the rack room and serves a web interface to anyone you give access to — on the floor, in the office, or from a phone in a truck. There is nothing to install on the client.

Process screens

Draw on the real floor plan. Import the store drawing as a background and drop live points where the equipment sits. Build a screen per rack, per room or per site.
Pipe and flow. Draw suction, liquid and discharge runs with animated flow that follows the actual state of the equipment, and reshape them later without starting over.
Setpoints and overrides. Change a setpoint, force an output, or set a timed override with an automatic expiry — every action attributed to the user who made it.
Units the way you want them. Switch the whole site between kPaG/°C and PSIG/°F, with a built-in pressure-to-temperature converter for the refrigerants you actually run.

← swipe to explore the screen →

Your own floor plan. Live case and room temperatures where the equipment actually sits — drawn in the browser in an afternoon, no CAD and no engineering ticket.

Trends and records

Every logged point, plotted. Pick a window from one hour to a full day, pan and zoom, step with the arrow keys, and split the plot into groups by engineering unit.
Export to CSV. Merged multi-point exports for food-safety records, insurance claims and warranty disputes — not a screenshot of a graph.
Gaps are shown, not smoothed. If a controller stopped reporting, the line breaks. You see the truth.

← swipe to explore the screen →

Local trend viewer. Twenty-four hours of a small store — case discharge air, head-pressure valve position and compressor proofs on one time base, split into groups by engineering unit. Hover anywhere for every value at that instant.

Alarms & notification

An alarm that nobody receives is not an alarm.

BARCHA alarms are defined once, on the point, and then routed to the people who can do something about them. Every notification carries the context a technician needs to decide whether to drive out: the value, the limit, the delay that was configured, and the two hours of history leading up to it.

Analog and digital alarms. High and low limits, state alarms, and per-point delays set in hours, minutes and seconds so a defrost cycle doesn’t page anyone.
Acknowledge and override. Acknowledge with a recall timer, or override a nuisance alarm for a set window — twelve hours, or an end date up to three months out.
Email and text. Routed per role, so refrigeration alarms and store-operations alarms reach different people.
Full audit trail. Who acknowledged what, when, and what the value was at the time.
Searchable history. Every notification sent, with CSV export.

Set once, applied everywhere

Alarm limits live on the point, not on the screen — so the same rule follows that point onto the dashboard, the process screen, the trend viewer and BARCHA Central.

Alarm notification. The value now, the configured limits and delay, a two-hour bar history and the full sample list — enough to triage from a phone.

And when the site itself goes quiet

The alarm you never get is the dangerous one. If a store loses its internet, or the HMI PC is switched off, its refrigeration alarms stop reaching you — and silence looks identical to everything being fine. BARCHA Central watches for that directly: it tells you when a site stops reporting, and it tells you again when the site comes back, with the total downtime.

Site offline and recovery notifications. Sent from Central, independently of the site — because a site that has stopped talking cannot raise its own alarm.

Across the fleet

BARCHA Central: every site, one list.

Each site pushes a summary out to BARCHA Central over an encrypted outbound connection: who is online, who is in alarm, and what the trend looked like before it went wrong — whatever brand of controller is in that store.

← swipe to explore the screen →

BARCHA Central. Five stores, four controller brands, one list — online status, active alarms, and acknowledge from the same screen. History and trend windows are held centrally, so the record survives a failed site PC.

Fleet at a glance

Sites online, sites needing attention, and critical alarms — the three numbers a manager needs before the morning call.

One alarm list

Filter by site or severity, show unacknowledged only, and acknowledge without logging into the store.

Central trend history

The window around each alarm is stored centrally, so you can review what happened after the fact.

Email Manager

Who gets what, on which transport, with searchable sent history and CSV export.

← swipe to explore the screen →

Central trend window. A different job from the site viewer: Central keeps the window around each alarm, so head office can review what happened at a store days later without opening that store’s HMI.

AI Site Manager (optional)

Advisory monitoring that reads the same data your technicians do and flags what a seasoned refrigeration hand would notice — a condenser slowly fouling, a rack drifting off setpoint, a case that never quite recovers from defrost. It raises the concern and explains its reasoning. It is advisory only — it never operates your equipment.

Energy management

Respond to time-of-use schedules or real-time price signals, pre-shed load ahead of a forecast peak, and stage recovery so the whole estate doesn’t restart at once. Demand charges are usually set by a handful of intervals a year — those are the ones worth managing.

Control & I/O

Control where the rack controller runs out.

Monitoring is where most sites stop. BARCHA doesn’t have to. Add a BARCHA Control I/O board on the network and you get real outputs driven by control blocks you configure in the same browser — no PLC, no ladder logic, no separate programming package.

Per board

8 analog inputs, 8 analog outputs (0-5 V or 0-10 V per channel), 8 relay outputs and 3 digital inputs. Modbus TCP or RTU.

Control blocks, built in

Thermostat, PI with proportional band, compressor staging with pump-down, defrost, safety interlock and free-form logic rules.

Written like a technician thinks

Cut-in and cut-out, minimum run and minimum off, interstage delay, high-pressure cap — not gains you have to guess at.

Safety has priority

Safety blocks are evaluated first and lock the output they protect. No other block can override an active interlock.

Security & architecture

Nothing on your network is exposed to the internet.

Sites connect outbound only. No ports are opened on your network, no inbound firewall rule is required, and there is no VPN into the store.

Your controllersCopeland · Danfoss
Micro Thermo · Modbus I/O

⟶

local network
read & write

BARCHA HMISite PC in the
rack room

⟶

outbound only
TLS encrypted

BARCHA CentralFleet view
email & text

No inbound ports. No VPN into the store. Nothing on your network is exposed to the internet.

TLS everywhere

All traffic is encrypted, with certificate validation on the uplink.

Per-site isolation

Every site is isolated from every other site in Central.

Multi-factor access

Central logins require MFA. Site access is role-based and fully logged.

Automatic backups

Configuration is backed up nightly with one-click restore.

What’s included

Live process screensDashboard tilesSmart alarms & delays Email & text notificationSite-offline alertingTrends & CSV export Schedules & defrostEnergy managementBARCHA Central fleet view Role-based users & audit logAutomatic backupsControl blocks & I/O AI Site Manager (optional)

Get started

See BARCHA HMI running on your controllers.

Book a live demo or request a quote — we’ll connect it to your own rack and show you your data on the screen, not a canned demo.

enquire@barchahmi.com

Tell us what’s in the rack room — brand and model is enough to start — and roughly how many sites you’re looking at.

How it goes in

Survey. What’s in the rack room and what you want on the screen. One visit, or one call with the panel schedules.
Commission. Site PC, point mapping and screens. The refrigeration keeps running the whole time.
Go live. Alarms routed, users created, site on Central — and your people trained on it.