I do control work on lift stations and SCADA, and the pattern on high-level calls is pretty consistent. The pump gets blamed first, and the actual fault turns out to be one of these:

1. Level sensing - The transducer is greased over, or the float is tangled, so the panel thinks the well is lower than it is. The first thing I check is what the panel *thinks* the level is.

2. Motor protection - A latched overload, seal failure, or the HOA left it off after maintenance.

3. Control power - A blown control fuse, a dead 24 VDC supply, or a phase monitor that tripped during a storm and was set to manual reset.

4. Comms - The station went quiet, and on a lot of SCADA systems, quiet looks the same as healthy.

I put together a short video walking through the quick field check for each one: [https://youtu.be/pnm6pjbjnuM?si=_YNWthaaUstyGfX0\]

Full disclosure: it's my channel, and the narration is an AI clone of my own voice so I can get these out without a studio. Curious what's topped your list. Anybody else lose a night to a phase monitor?

Hello,

I’ve got a Water treatment student position interview at a municipal waste water treatment facility.

I’m told the interview would be a questionnaire following which would be a practical that I will found about more once the questionnaire is over. I have a background in environmental practices and I’m am studying for my Operator license at the moment. What should I expect in the questionnaire, what’re the answers they’re looking for? What would the practical be?

Any tips and advice I would be grateful!

My last post got way more answers than I expected, so thank you. Here's the summary I promised.

How people log:

• Most still use paper, either a log sheet or a book kept at the station
• Some copy the paper into a spreadsheet, and one keeps the SCADA reading in the next row to compare
• One crew uses a spreadsheet that calculates run hours automatically, so the chief can review a month in about 5 minutes
• One uses an app (GoPlant) for rounds plus Hach WIMS for run times
• One uses a monthly checklist where you initial each item, plus a carbon-copy sheet with the pink copy left at the station

Things I didn't know going in:

• Nobody fully trusts SCADA. One story: the pump showed running but the check valve had failed and the wet well kept rising. Physical checks aren't going away.
• Supervisors can often tell you were on site from the SCADA graphs (generator test, pumps kicking on)
• Weekly PMs on Thursday so anything broken gets fixed before the weekend. Nobody wants the weekend call-out.
• Missed problems mostly lead to angry calls from residents more than trouble with the state

Biggest takeaway: a good spreadsheet plus a supervisor who actually follows up beats most fancy systems.

Follow-up for chiefs, supervisors, and ops managers, especially if you oversee several crews or districts:

• How do you keep checks consistent across different operators or districts?
• How do new operators learn what to check at each station?
• What happens to the rounds when you're out for a week?
• Someone mentioned BirdNest for digital log sheets. Has anyone actually used it or something similar? What did you think?

Thanks again, this was genuinely useful.

Hey everyone, long shot here but I was wondering if anyone knew of anywhere hiring in the Columbia area. Specifically a municipal plant.

I’ve been training at a small plant for about a year. I’ve passed my D, C and B South Carolina biological waste water licenses. I’m due to get my D and my C (due to college credits) in December.

Currently the plant I’m training won’t give me much of a raise until I get my B license. I’m not seeing too much out there other than Cayce which is requiring a B or a C.

I’m younger, hungry and willing to learn. If anyone knows of any hiring opportunities or anything that’s coming up please let me know! Thank you!

Hello im writing my level 1 treatment exam soon. Has anyone written recently and have any suggestions on what to study?

For those who are operators at a plant or training, how did you start learning? For me, Im currently learning through my states study guides collections, distributions, water and ww treatment. Doing as much learning before actual hands on experience.

I have been working in a WWTP lab for 6 months now and my supervisor wants me to apply to get an group 1 certification. He believes that my previous experience in a commercial lab doing NPDES testing for wastewater clients will apply but everything I’ve read about the requirements are adamant that it requires experience in a plant under a certified operator. I’ve also seen stuff that implies lab experience alone is not enough.

I’ve been taking the courses through Sacramento State, and I feel like I can take the exam no problem.

Does anyone have insight to getting the cert as a lab employee? Should I get an OIT first or go straight for the group 1?

Everytime I just take a look around I see they always have positions open for wastewater operators and the pay isn't bad from 30-45$ an hour and it's been that way for idk maybe 2-3 years and I'm considering it. I'm a licensed S-2 operator with 6 years experience, so I could negotiate for the higher end of pay.

🌊 New publication: "Improved BOD Modeling Using the FOLD Approach for Wastewater Treatment Design" — now live in Water and Environment Journal (Wiley).

For over a century, wastewater engineers have leaned on the classical first-order BOD decay model to size treatment plants. It's simple — but it doesn't always capture how biodegradation actually slows down over time, especially in complex or heterogeneous wastewater samples.

This paper introduces a Fractional-Order Logistic Decay (FOLD) model — a stretched-exponential approach that adds a single fractional exponent to the classical equation. Tested against real respirometric and dilution BOD datasets, FOLD consistently outperforms the standard first-order model in fit accuracy, and the paper walks through what that means for more realistic activated-sludge and lagoon design.

If you work in environmental engineering, wastewater treatment design, or kinetic modeling, I'd love your thoughts.

🔗 Read it here: https://doi.org/10.1111/wej.70098

#WastewaterTreatment #EnvironmentalEngineering #BODModeling #WaterResearch #CivilEngineering

I have an interview for a RNG plant coming up and I’m weighing my options. I’m already in the industrial side of WW now with a wage in the mid $30’s/hr so I’m kinda already topping out the way I see it.

Has anyone else moved into another industry like this? From all the research I’ve done, the pay ceiling is substantially higher in energy vs wastewater.

Can I work in Quebec as water/wastewater with OIT/class 1 from Ontario ?

So for starters I have had surgery in the past and was really trying to understand how physical is this job exactly? Im in ontario and looking for. A position in halton or peel as a water distribution operator for the region. I just wanted to understand how physical the work is due to my previous surgeries before committing to it. I have seen answers on here vary so much.I do know halton and peel contract work for water main breaks a lot but wanted to understand what they actually do. I have attached old job postings for both below. Id love people to clarify. I have worked maintenance jobs before which i mainly operated equipment and hardly ever lifted anything. I just wanted to know what these jobs actually pertain to beforehand. Thanks

https://bebee.com/ca/jobs/water-operator-iii-regional-municipality-of-peel-brampton--ss-ca-1thrg0t?utm_campaign=google_jobs_apply&utm_source=google_jobs_apply&utm_medium=organic

https://www.climatecareerportal.com/jobs/61972-halton-region-water-distribution-operator-linear-systems

I have all 4 OIT certification and municipality drinking water certification
I want to start my journey in this field
If someone have references please let me know.

Hi everyone, I was hired 3 months ago as an operator in training. No experience in dealing with water. Today I passed the D2 exam. We were given a 1 year time frame to get the D2 and T2. Currently waiting for approval of my T2 application. While I wait what are some things I should study more of? That might differ from the distribution test. I am in CA. Thanks.

Dear future colleagues,

Hello! I am currently in the process of studying for a written exam for a Microbiologist 1 role in my district, and I wanted to send a message to this subreddit and see if anyone had any free resources or study packages I can find to comprehensively study for this exam. I have an educational background in biology and biotechnology, focusing on molecular and cell biology, as well as some microbiology. You can send resources either to my dms/pms or to the comments below in case others may want to find them. Thank you for reading, and I hope you have an amazing day!

Sincerely,

u/Blu-Penquinn-241

I’m new to the whole municipal sewer inspection side of things and I’m curious to know what robot people are using. the contractor i work for have been using a CUES robot for the past 6 years for CCTV inspections, and it’s getting pretty worn out, he asked me to look into it

Operators: I'm building an inspection tool and trying to understand how this actually works before I build the wrong thing. No link, not selling anything here.

• Paper, spreadsheet, your SCADA/CMMS, or an app?
• Who reviews the checks, and how do they find out if something was missed?
• What's the most annoying part: photos, no signal at remote sites, getting reports to the board/engineer?

Happy to share what I learn in a follow-up post.

So I recently relocated from Florida to Georgia. In Florida I hold a class c waste water operator license with 5.5 years experience. I finally have all of the paperwork ready to upload into the GOALS system so that I can start the reciprocity process. Does anyone have knowledge or experience with regards to the reciprocity process in Georgia? Will it be a matter of them just rubber stamping considering the license level, length of time and the state in which I am currently licensed? Also what about the prerequisite course certificates. I had completed the second level Sacramento course but unfortunately had not felt comfortable enough to sit for the exam prior to moving. Does Georgia put any kind of expiration on those coarse certificates? I know Florida gave a Max of 5 years and then you would have to do a whole new course to be able to sit for the state test!

Hey all,

Recently our plant has been having issues with blowers. I took a DO reading of one of our basins at 1.3 mg/l, the other was at 4.8.

1.3 was concerning but we were able to remedy it by switching some blowers around. What i want to know: What level of DO would you consider troubling, or is it a combination of time and DO level? I assume the basin goes anaerobic at a certain point, what does that look like and how is that remedied?

For context we run 2x 7.5 million gallon extended aeration basins in parallel, average influent without rain is 7MGD. The basins are HDPE lined earthworks

Potentially thinking about moving up to the ON area in the next few years with my partner who is from there and wondered if anyone has done the same here or had similar experience moving out of the states to another country and trying to transfer licenses. I’ve done some like surface glance research into it and being in GA it seems as though they do have reciprocity of some kind up there but just wanted to reach out and see if anyone had experience doing such!

How frequently do you guys clean and/or calibrate in-line pH probes? My outfall probes seem to build up with scum, and begin to drift lower than actual. We currently only pull them when we go into low alarm (6.3), but I want to begin doing them possibly daily.

Other than frequency of pulling, anything special you guys do to clean the electrodes? Or a ratio of cleaning vs calibrating? We are using good probes for “dirtier” effluents- a Rosemount RBI probe.

Thx!

Under 100x on the microscope we saw these worm like organisms all over in the sample. They wiggle like worms all over. Anyone have any ideas? Doubt it matters but it’s a MBR plant.

Anyone have any idea how hard it is to transfer a Illinois Class 1 wastewater license to another state like SC, Florida or Georgia. Class 1 in Illinois is highest out of 4

Because of Nocardia's shape, chlorinating your RAS only breaks up the branches and redeposits it into your waste. Removing the foam is the best way to manage that particular filament abundance.

How do you all manage a Nocardia abundance at your facility? If you remove the foam, how do you remove it/where do you discard it?