More feed line problems (setting delay timers)

Once we start gathering more and more feed data and keeping in the store we can go back and look at some interesting things.  We have already posted about alerts to solve feed problems, such as feed outages, bin rotations, and feed ordering, and what we can do to help solve them. This morning I decided to go back and look at frequency of feed events and discovered some alarming problems which we went over this morning with the site owner and are fixing.

In my analysis, I found that on some feed lines, the Feedmeter was reporting feed events very frequently, sometimes every minute.  See the underlying data in the store below:

In 18 minutes, we reported 16 feed events.  When I roll up the data to a day and also look at the sum, average, sample count I see the following data.

Several issues for us to work through here.

1.  At that small of a run time the Feedmeter is set up to fail.  A key variable in the Feedmeter's algorithm is the run time.  If a setting is off causing the start to end run time to be off by 0.25 seconds, it is rounding error on a 60 second run; but catastrophic on a 1.25 second run.  The Feedmeter's ability to estimate intake is not optimal.

2.  Feed motor life expectancy is slightly reduced for every time the motor runs.  A motor that runs 500 times a day versus 50 times a day probably will go bad much faster.  I did a quick inquiry with some equipment sales guys in town and a typical motor life is 5-6 years and costs $225 to replace.  Moisture (see future blog post about humidity sensors), feed quality and frequency of running will cause them to go bad faster.  

3.  Feed motors failing cause feed outages.  Without a full suite of monitoring it is easy not to recognize this problem until it is later than you would like.  By the time it is fixed, the feed outage has likely cost you money and hurt your animals.

So how does it happen?  Its a tough job and barn workers forget about it.  Perhaps a line didn't start in the past and the barn worker blames the delay timer and shuts it off.  There is a lot of things to train and its possible the barn worker was never trained in how to use the delay timers.

We could set alerts around delay timers if we wanted to it would be very easy.  Simply take the current value's timestamp in the store minus the previous value's timestamp in the store and see if it exceeds a minimum delay timer value.  If it doesn't send an alert.  I always hate having pointless, repetitive low-value alerts so I would be more prone to having a once a week check.  Grovestreams does a very good job of allowing you to add unlimited intelligence to the alerting engine.  Perhaps in this case put in the software to look at the average time between feed runs for the past week or count the total feed runs and alert if it exceeds a certain value.  

In addition, monitor your whole site for feed.  If a barn worker is worried about the line starting up on a delay timer we have an alert for that out of the box.  

In conclusion, putting a cost on improper settings on a feed line is nearly impossible and not that large in the grand scheme of things.  The bigger issue is the cost of poor on-site management to livestock operations.  If barn workers are not setting delay timers properly it is an indication of poor management which likely have bigger ramifications throughout that site's production.