Proliphix thermostats have saved us from MAJOR problems.
Last week, we had a major snowstorm and got about 2 feet of snow in 8 hours — the county literally declared a snow emergency and ordered everyone off the roads expect for emergency vehicles. Unbeknown to us, our snowplow service had performed their duties and was dutifully plowing out the church parking lot all night — this was all well and good except for the fact that our ultra high-efficiency boilers have exhaust vents 3′ off the parking lot and the plow completely covered them with a huge mound of snow. Because the exhaust vents were covered up, the boilers automatically shut down to protect themselves from damage. It was only because we were snowed-in and unable to leave our house all day, that we randomly logged in and checked the temperatures at church and discovered the sanctuary close to 50 degrees (meaning the gymnasium was probably even lower and could soon have pipes freezing). We were able to call a church member, who lives a block away from the church, and have him clean out the exhaust pipes and check everything — as soon as he did, the boilers both fired up and went back to normal.
As a result of that incident, I went through and set up all the alerts for notifying us whenever there’s a problem. I had done that initially during installation but somewhere along the line turned it off during configuration (probably to avoid getting bombarded with 1000 emails). Now the thermostats will email AND text message me whenever the temperature drops below 55 degrees anywhere in the building. Lucky for me (sarcasm!), it happened this morning at 3am. When I woke up at 5am for work, I immediately saw the text messages on my phone and pulled up the monitoring website to discover once again, temperatures were getting very low (it’s 14 degrees outside, and the temperature is supposed to drop to ZERO today). I got my act together and got over to church as soon as I could. The exhaust vents were clear but both boilers were shut down with some kind of thermostat error. I was able to manually reset them, check the pipes everywhere to make sure they were getting heat, and save the day! There again, if we didn’t have the Proliphix units controlling our temperatures, we would have had NO idea, for potentially a day or two, that there was a serious problem. Yes, we will have to do further research to figure out what made the boilers both shut down (there’s a problem somewhere) but at least we can know soon after they do go down, long before anything is able to freeze.
You might be thinking, “I’d really like to get some of those thermostats but they’re just so expensive.” I can understand that, but let me just say, ours have paid for themselves this winter — we likely would have had a burst pipe last week had it not been for these things — and that would have cost us a LOT more money and frustration!
Thank you, Proliphix IMT 350c/w and Uniphy Remote Management!!!!
