Snowmaking nights on record: weather at every elevation, and a season to plan from

What a snowmaking night looks like

A snowmaking night is a long shift of checking and adjusting. The crew goes up at dusk, checks the hydrants, starts guns and watches the conditions. Through the night they check each gun, move the ones whose pile is big enough, thaw a frozen hydrant, swap a hose that split, and call in on the radio. At the end of the shift they shut down what has to stop and tell the next crew what happened.

Most of what that crew learned stays with them. Which guns ran where, for how long, which hydrant froze again and which gun kept icing up: if it is written down at all, it is on a whiteboard in the shop or a page in a binder. A week later it is hard to find, and by next season it is gone.

Beside your snowmaking system, not instead of it

A snowmaking control system runs the guns, hydrants, pumps and compressors. Powoflow is not a snowmaking automation system and does not replace one. It is for the work around it: the weather across the mountain, the upkeep of every lift, gun and machine, and the people out on the hill.

We can connect to the system you run, on request. We do not have such a connection today. We build it with you for your equipment, so its data sits beside your weather, work orders and machines.

Weather at every elevation

Whether a gun can make snow depends on the air where the gun stands: its temperature and its humidity, which together give the wet-bulb temperature crews work to. Wind decides where the snow lands, and whether a lift can run. A thermometer at the base, or the forecast for the area, says little about the summit on a clear, cold night.

So measure where the work is. A weather station wired to a gateway at the summit, one mid-mountain and one at the base each report wind, temperature, humidity, pressure, rain and light. You set a lift's wind limit as an alarm on the station by that lift, and a station that stops reporting raises an alarm too. Each station needs power and a connection where it stands, so they usually go where those already are.

Wet-bulb, plainly: Powoflow does not calculate it yet. Each station records the air temperature and humidity it is worked out from, and your crew can work it out with its own chart or calculator. We are adding a calculated wet-bulb temperature to the weather station, with an alarm at the threshold you set for when the window opens and closes. Every area, gun and crew works to its own number, so the threshold is yours to set.

A record of every night

The asset register is where it starts: a record for each lift, snow gun, hydrant, compressor, groomer and snowmobile, with its files, its status and every job done on it. Then the night's work goes on those records instead of the whiteboard:

• Gun moves, starts, stops and repairs as work orders, so the morning crew reads what was done and what is still waiting, and each gun builds up its own history.
• The hydrant walk as a checklist, with the questions the crew answers at each one.
• Lift and groomer checks on a schedule: a maintenance plan raises the work order when a date-based check falls due.
• An SOS for whoever is out alone: a tag with an SOS button raises an alarm with the person's last-known position wherever a gateway is in range. Your own people receive and act on it, at all hours; we do not watch alarms for you.
• The machines on the map: a rugged tracker on a groomer or snowmobile shows where it was last seen, whether it is moving, and when it was taken off.

A season to plan the next one from

When the snowmaking season ends, the questions start. When did the cold nights come? How often did wind stop a lift? Which guns and hydrants needed the most repairs, and which machines spent the most time in the shop?

Kept records answer them. Readings, alarms and work orders stay for as long as your workspace exists. Each station has a calendar of past conditions; you can put the summit and the base side by side on one chart and download it as CSV; and each gun, hydrant and groomer carries its own repair history. The summer repairs, and the first nights of next winter, are planned from what actually happened.

What it does not do yet

• It does not calculate wet-bulb temperature yet.
• It does not measure snow depth or snowfall.
• It is not a snowmaking automation system and does not replace one. It does not connect to snowmaking systems today; we build that on request. Control of pumps and similar equipment is available on request through the Powoflow Sense Mesa gateway or the S2100 data logger, set up with you for your equipment.
• Weather stations, gateways and tags are available on request: tell us what you need and we quote it. Kits have no published prices. Tags and trackers need a gateway in range.
• Alarms show in Powoflow in your browser. On a phone they need the mobile app.