Why Zeeco?
MICA Controls has installed and replaced flame scanners from nearly every manufacturer—and Zeeco is the one we keep coming back to
In combustion, there's no room for compromise. A single missed flame or a nuisance false trip can trigger a full shutdown, a costly relight sequence, and real safety exposure for everyone on site. When reliability actually matters, we reach for Zeeco.
How did we find Zeeco?
At MICA Controls, the engineering arm behind MICA Technologies, we've spent years designing and commissioning burner management systems. That work has put us hands-on with Zeeco scanners, competing manufacturers, and plenty of legacy equipment we've since ripped out and replaced.
That experience spans boilers, HRSGs, sulfur recovery units, and reformers—some of the harshest fired-equipment environments out there. Along the way, we learned which flame scanner we trust when the stakes are highest. Time and again, the answer came back the same: Zeeco ProFlame. It consistently delivers superior reliability, flexibility, and value, which is why we recommend, specify, and sell it today.
What makes Zeeco our number one choice for our own projects?
MICA Controls prefers to use Zeeco ProFlame scanners for a multitude of reasons. Here are the highlights our engineers have shared:
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Cost-Effective by Design – Often a half to a third of the cost of comparable upgraded scanners, freeing up budget for broader coverage.
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Compact Footprint – The ProFlame's smaller size makes it a far easier add-on in crowded, congested facilities.
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No Software Required for Tuning – An instrument tech can tune and adjust a ProFlame with nothing more than a screwdriver and a meter.
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Dual Gain Flexibility – Choose high or low gain to adapt the logic in your PLC to different stages of the light-off sequence.
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Simple, Tactile Adjustment – Two screwdriver-adjustable knobs set the gain—no laptop, no proprietary interface.
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Onboard Intensity Indication – Built-in lights show you flame intensity at a glance.
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4-20 mA Analog Output – Continuous flame intensity monitoring that gives operators real insight into the firebox.
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SIL Rated with Functional Safety Data – Certified for use in safety-critical burner management systems.
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Plug-and-Play Retrofit – Zeeco supplies all required fittings, lenses, cooling modules, and accessories to replace virtually any competitor's scanner.
Where we like to use Zeeco scanners
The ProFlame line covers single and multiple burner applications across both hazardous and non-hazardous areas—ZPF-110 for Zone 1, ZPF-120 for Zone 2, and ZPF-130 for non-hazardous areas, plus ProFlame+ utility-grade and SRU-specific models. That range means we rarely have to compromise on fit. But a few applications really show why we lean on Zeeco.
Boiler Burners and HRSGs
This is where the ProFlame shines. Compact, affordable, and easy to tune, it's an ideal fit for multi-burner boilers and heat recovery steam generators.
Voting logic is a big part of our reliability strategy here. On boilers, we may run two out of three. On HRSGs, we typically run two out of two to detect flame on both ends of the burner runner. Because ProFlame scanners are SIL rated and come with functional safety data, we can build these architectures with confidence—if one scanner fails, we maintain safe, informed operation.
Reformers
We've done a lot of reformers in our burner management work, and wherever possible we try to design them without flame scanners at all. When we can't, the enemy is heat.
In a penthouse down-fired reformer, temperatures sit at 50°C-plus at eye level and climb the closer you get to the ground. We once had an engineer lose the treads off their safety boots—the heat melted the glue on the soles. That's the environment a scanner has to survive.
Zeeco's fiber-optic technology solves it by remoting the scanner entirely. Instead of a housing sitting in the heat, you get a panel with a module for each scanner, and a high-temperature fiber-optic cable acts as a light conduit—channeling UV light from the burners back to a scanner mounted in a cool spot on the penthouse or terrace wall.
Compare that to the legacy Fireye setups we've replaced. Those units sat in insulated blankets pumped full of cooling air, with even the transmitter head wrapped in its own cooling jacket. The moment that purge air failed, the scanners died—and you'd get false loss-of-flame signals and nuisance trips. Zeeco's remote fiber-optic solution is easy to install, hosts multiple modules, and lives somewhere cool. No cooling-air lifeline to fail.
Sulfur Recovery Units
SRUs are brutal for standard flame detection. Steam injection, H2S, and mixed-fuel co-firing all trip up conventional UV and IR scanners.
The Zeeco SRU scanner solves this differently. Instead of reading UV or IR, it measures flame temperature and changes in flame temperature using an optical focal system that focuses a spot on the flame onto a thermal pile inside the scanner. It won't hand you a process variable—it tells you whether you have a flame or you don't—but it can see through steam injection and non-natural-gas fuels where UV and IR fall short.
Why does this matter so much? Anyone who's run a sulfur plant knows the nightmare scenario: you lose your flame, don't realize it, and keep the air blowers running. That air reacts with the elemental sulfur in your beds, temperatures take off, and you can literally burn down your sulfur plant. The root cause of a temperature runaway is almost always an undetected flame loss combined with a logic system that didn't react. A reliable SRU scanner is your defense against exactly that.
There's a cost angle, too. In co-firing or low-H2S scenarios where you light off with natural gas, a UV/IR approach may force you to run two scanners—a UV for the methane and an IR for the acid gas (which doesn't emit UV). Worse, IR scanners can mistake hot refractory for a live flame. A single Zeeco SRU scanner replaces that two-scanner workaround and reads the flame more honestly.
