Remotely Monitor Your Barns to Optimize Energy Usage

Any grower will tell you: That feeling when you step outside into the bone-chilling cold during the darkest winter months is dreadful. When it’s 3 AM with temps in the single-digits, and you’re not sure why your old barn alarm is calling you, it's hard not to anticipate the worst possible outcome.

Earlier this winter, hog farmer Jason Drenth and many growers across the country were faced with extreme cold that tested the limits of their barn equipment.

“With one of the blizzards we had before Christmas, it was 35° below zero. When you have a barn full of pigs during a time like this, you always worry about the heater going down.”

Jason’s Sensaphone required him to call into the system to know his current barn conditions. Whenever a sensor malfunctioned, it would call him during all hours of the night. “Eventually, I ended up just turning it off.”

The persistent false alarms and lack of visibility into his barns was no way for Jason to monitor his pigs.

“If I had BarnTalk, I knew I would be able to view conditions on my app and know everything is ok.”

After making the switch to BarnTalk, Jason is saving time and gaining peace of mind from knowing his barn monitoring system is doing its job.

“I’m going to save myself about four trips to the barn just by going on the app and checking that the heater is working.”

Along with having 24/7 visibility into their barn environment, seeing barn temps in real-time is also helping producers identify potential inefficiencies with their heating systems. Propane usage is a highly-variable input cost that no grower can control—but detecting wastage with real-time monitoring solutions can help mitigate losses and stay ahead of high energy bills.