Relief valve stuck open at an irrigation pumping station: the call said what and where

An irrigation community runs a pump house with two delivery sets, filters, relief valves and several storage reservoirs. The panel has dry contacts for every element, but nobody watches them: the pump house is kilometres from the village and the warden drives by once a day.

The typical failure is silent. A relief valve that stays open sends water back to the reservoir while the pumps run flat out. A tripped thermal breaker leaves a sector without water in mid August. It is found the next day, on the electricity bill or when a grower calls because nothing is coming out.

The community had priced PLCs and classic telecontrol: high budget, an outside integrator and months of project for what they needed, which was to know the state of sixteen contacts.

An Aviot controller was fitted inside the panel with a 16-input module on the Modbus bus, powered from the controller's 24 V output with its own battery backup. The community's electrician did the terminal-by-terminal wiring from the installation guide in one morning.

From the app, the person in charge gave every input its real name: delivery pump 1 and 2, relief valve, low level on each reservoir, dirty filter, mains failure. That name is what the voice call pronounces when the input changes state, and what shows in the app and in the history.

With no production cycles, the alarm is armed and disarmed with one switch from the app, and each contact in the call chain has its own number of call attempts before the next one is tried. The app header shows battery, phases, bus status and coverage, so you know the unit is alive even when nothing is alarming.

In the first week in service, four real incidents fired: a relief valve open at 10:11, two reservoir levels and a delivery pump. All four arrived as a voice call naming the element and all four were acknowledged by pressing 1 within four minutes of the trip.

The community stopped the daily check-up drive to the pump house. The app history logs every state change with exact time, which allowed them to retune a valve that was opening too often.

The whole installation, wiring included, was done in-house with no integrator: the 16-input module is an accessory of the same controller that farms use, not an automation project.