One Small Box Saves The Day — Twice — In Pump System Solution

The situation

In the middle of the night at 3 a.m. on a Saturday in the spring of 2016, Jamie Veley got a phone call. Something was wrong at the Rose Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, where Veley was Maintenance Supervisor.

Over the phone, a plant operator told him the six newly installed Grundfos submersible wastewater pumps were not working properly at the plant in Woodstock, Georgia.

"The influent level was rising, and the pumps were not running," he recalls. "So he went down to the influent station and tried starting one pump. It went into alarm and shut off. He started a second pump. Alarm, shut off. He went to a third pump - alarm, shut off."

The alarms were coming from the pumps' MP 204 motor protection units - something that Veley's crew did not yet have experience with, since everything was so new. Veley got in touch with Grundfos's Brendan Watson. Watson used the Grundfos GO remote monitoring app to see that the MP 204's alarm was registering a "Current Asymmetry" of 12.9% - a power imbalance that would quickly destroy any pump.