CrosStar LiftStar™ System Frequently Asked Questions
Can any cellular telephone service company be used with LiftStar? Over 95% of the nation's AMPS Cellular Telephone Service Providers allow LiftStar communication traffic on their networks. And CrosStar handles all the subscription fees with the service provider, thus the Utility only deals with CrosStar, and not the local cell phone services.
What happens if the cell phone service company or tower is out of service? Over 85% of the AMPS cellular telephone markets in the United States are serviced by two Cellular Telephone Service Providers that allow LiftStar communication traffic on their networks. Thus when one service or tower fails, the LiftStar LS1-1000 switches over to the other service provider automatically. If you have questions on the service available in your area, please contact
CrosStar's Technical Support.
How do you calculate the monthly service fee for a LiftStar System? First a decision on whether each LiftStar will report with the accumulated pump starts and running times either weekly or daily must be made. Multiply the number of LiftStars units that are reporting weekly by $13.50 ($12.50 if 10 or more units in system). Multiply the number of LiftStar units that are reporting daily by $19.00 ($17.50 if over 9 LiftStars). Add these two amounts together, plus $20.00 for the base Utility monthly fee to arrive at the standard monthly service fee for the system. If StarView is used by the Utility, the base Utility monthly fee would be $25 instead of $20.
If reports are faxed to the utility in addition to being e-mailed, add another $5.00 per month.
An example would be an utility with 15 lift stations with LiftStar LS-1000s. Five of the station will be setup to report pump starts and run times weekly, with the other ten reporting daily. The standard monthly service fee would be 5 x $12.50(weekly rate w/ 15 units) = $62.50, plus 10 x $17.50(daily rate w/ 15 units) = $175.00, plus $20.00 base utilily fee for a total monthly service fee of $257.50.
How long does it take from an alarm occurance at a LiftStar before the On-Call Duty Personnel receives the alarm notification on their pager or cell phone? The short answer is generally within 60 seconds but sometimes as long as 15 minutes. First, depending on the alarm, the LiftStar will wait between 10 seconds (for pump and level alarms) to 10 minutes (for power fail) before transmitting the alarm to reduce false alarm notifications. Within seconds of the condition being transmitted by the LiftStar, the CrosStar Secuired Central Computer System will have received and stored the data, posted it on the utility's web site, and if required, send the alarm notification. Most paging and text messaging services will deliver the message to the pager or cell phone with in seconds, but during high traffic periods, the message may be delayed for several minutes.
During presentations with our sales demonstration unit (a LiftStar with switches for alarm contacts and time delays set near zero), notification delays to a cell phone have been as short as 5 seconds, typically around 10 seconds, and a couple of times as long as 2 minutes.
What is the best mobile device for On-Call Duty Personnel to have to receive alarm notifications? CrosStar highly recommends PCS or Digital Cellular Telephones with Two-Way Short Text Messaging. We have found that the PCS/Digital Cell system generally delivers the alarm notification to the phone within 5 seconds from when the CrosStar Secuired Central Computer System sent the page. Alphanumeric Paging Services and Text Messaging Services tend to queue messages, thus some times taking up to 15 minutes to deliver the alarm notification message. Two-Way Messaging is perferred so the On-Call Duty Personnel just needs to send a reply message back to the CrosStar Secuired Central Computer System to acknowledge receiving the alarm.
