Resting Easy with Wireless Barn Monitoring

Fire and gasoline. Water and oil. Garlic and date night. There’s a long list of things that don’t pair well together, and having miles of wires inside a barn is no exception.

For poultry grower Todd Clark in Embro, Ontario, the challenges of using a wired alarm system have been a harsh reality for over two decades. Clark Family Turkey Farm monitored their poultry houses with Sensaphone, which was tied into their landline. Getting alarms to function properly was a constant and costly battle.

“Over the years we’d been upgrading our farm with new water lines underground. During that process, the machine digging the new lines clipped some of the alarm wires.”

Hiring an electrician to fix the wiring issues and attempt to restore the alarm came with a hefty price tag.

“It would be $500 here, a few hundred there, but all in all it would have been several thousand dollars trying to get all the barns working properly. But we never could and didn’t want to spend more money on an old system.”

As maintenance and system upgrades were made to their facility, Todd says the unreliability of using wired alarms became more evident and unavoidable.

“With my old alarm, I got a call once saying our barn was -100 degrees, and it definitely wasn’t. Something happened with the wiring and it gave us false information.”

Todd says it was time to get a system that was up-to-date and one they could finally depend on. Along with the freedom of no longer dealing with wires and the costs of repairing the old alarm system, Todd says the ability to monitor conditions remotely with BarnTalk was the flexibility they needed. Gone are the days of false alarms and expensive service calls.

Todd says the ability to monitor conditions remotely with BarnTalk was the flexibility they needed.

"BarnTalk gives you a sense of relief knowing that something is functioning properly, and there’s no wires. Just go on your phone, have a look, and see what the temperature and other conditions are.”

Temperature is the number one environmental measure Todd and his family monitor to ensure their birds are growing under optimal conditions. For poults that are more sensitive to cooler and warmer temperatures than mature turkeys, Todd leans on BarnTalk to notify him when conditions are too warm or too cold for their liking.

“We can go home at the end of the day and know we’ll get an alarm if something goes wrong.”