10/14/2026
Every collection system has one. The station that goes off at 2 a.m., gets cleared, runs for eleven days, and goes off again. Everybody on the crew knows which one it is, and it usually has a nickname.
What it almost never has is a root cause on paper, because every callout gets it running again and nobody gets paid to sit down with a year of data.
Here is the exercise nobody does. Rank your stations by callout count over the last twelve months. That is an hour of work, maybe less. Most utilities have never made that list, and when they do, the top of it is obvious to everyone in the field and news to everyone in the office.
Then take the worst one and pull four numbers:
1. Average run time per start. Under about two minutes means the pump is oversized.
2. Starts per day against the motor nameplate's allowable starts per hour. That is a published limit, not a suggestion.
3. Hour meters on both pumps, to confirm alternation is actually alternating.
4. When the level transducer was last verified against a physical measurement.
You will usually know the answer before lunch.
A callout is not a repair. It is a subscription.
If the reason is what the wet well does to solids, the pit is the part worth designing out. OverWatch runs in line with no wet well at all, one pump carrying the whole flow and the second standing by for full redundancy.
That is what our pump audit is for. We come out, go through your pump system to find what is actually going wrong, and you get a report of the findings.
Industrial Flow Solutions
Why a station keeps coming back: https://www.rhinopumps.com/root-cause-analysis-and-qc-guide-for-post-service-pump-downtime
