Also a Customer
Within the first week of monitoring, I received two alerts from the NightOwl monitoring system: low storage tank level and low pressure. ‘What the heck?’ I thought. Turned out, my irrigation system had kicked on at midnight. By 3:00 a.m., I had a problem. My well couldn’t keep up. The storage tank level had fallen so low that it turned off the booster pump. The pressure then dropped to zero. This caused one my irrigation zones to get less water than it should.
I was shocked to discover this had been happening for years while I was sound asleep. By the time I’d wake up, my storage tank had already refilled. There was no sign of anything unusual… other than an oddly struggling patch of grass in the yard.
Thanks to the alerts from the NightOwl system, I was able to fix the problem with a simple adjustment to my irrigation controller.
The water well system also feeds water to my house, but the water quality is not what we’d like. So, I have a whole-house reverse osmosis (RO) system that treats the water and pushes it to my house — as well as to my in-laws next door, and to the office and shop for my drilling company, Bee Cave Drilling. The RO system is great, but it only produces water at 2 gallons per minute (gpm). I installed the NightOwl on the RO unit to monitor the system.
One night, I took my wife to dinner, and as we walked into the restaurant, I received a text alert from the NightOwl monitoring system notifying me that my treated water booster pump had started too many times that day. I thought that was a little odd, but I wasn’t too worried. Five minutes later, I received another text alert: My treated water storage tank was getting low. Now I knew I had a problem.
I figured it must be a leak in the distribution system that was draining my treated water. I called my son and asked him to investigate. He found the distribution manifold and discovered that when he closed the valve to the office, the flow of water stopped.
When I got home, the tank was refilling. I had water, and I never lost pressure to either house. It turned out that the leak in the office was just a toilet flapper that didn’t properly seat the last time it was used. But, without the NightOwl monitoring system, I would not have known about the problem until my tank was empty. Then it would have taken several hours to produce enough treated water to return water flow to the houses. I was really glad to have gotten that warning before I had a much bigger problem on my hands.
