Let’s start with the data, because controlling water cost at your property or portfolio depends on it. In his previous blog, my colleague Paul Leeland walked you through how to work your daily leak report like a pro. Great advice. To put it into action, your devices need to be talking to ION Intelligence, aka ION Control™, in the first place.
I’ve walked properties with site teams who were doing everything right – checking the daily email, logging in, prioritizing their list – and still losing water because a gateway had been offline for two weeks and nobody knew. That’s not a failure of effort. That’s a visibility gap. And it’s completely preventable.
No data means no visibility, and no visibility means no savings
A property with offline meters is flying blind. It doesn’t matter how good your team is at reading leak reports or how disciplined your morning routine is. If the devices feeding ION Control™ aren’t online, you’re not seeing the whole picture and could miss the leak that matters most.
That’s why we hold every property to the same North Star: 95% device health or above, at all times. Not as an arbitrary target, but because that’s the threshold where you get the full picture so you can maximize your efforts and efficiency.
What “device health” actually means
There are three types of devices in your network that work together like links in a chain:
- Gateways: the hub that connects your property’s network to ION Control™
- Routers: the relay points that carry data from meters back to the gateway
- Meters: the sensors at the unit level that scan for leaks, providing data 20,000 more granular than typical billing meters
When one of these goes offline, it doesn’t just affect that one device. It affects everything downstream. A dead router can take a dozen meters down with it. A dead gateway can take the whole property offline. That’s why device health isn’t a background metric – it’s the foundation everything else in this series sits on.
Make it part of your daily site check
ION Control™ has a Gateway & Device Health page built for exactly this. It shows you what’s online, what’s offline, and flags issues by device type. I tell every team the same thing: check this page the same way you check the Top 5 leak email. Same routine, same habit, every morning. A thirty-second glance can save you a two-week blind spot.
Troubleshoot in the right order. Always start with gateways.
If something’s offline, don’t start at the unit level. Start at the top of the chain.
A down gateway takes everything else with it, so that’s always your first stop. Check the power and connection, confirm it’s communicating, and escalate quickly if it doesn’t come back because until it does, you’re losing visibility across the whole property.
Routers are usually the next stop, and the fixes tend to be simpler: a power cycle, a signal check, a relocation if it’s too far from what it’s relaying.
Meters are last, and they’re a little different. An offline meter is sometimes a connectivity issue, but it can also be a hardware issue – a battery, a sensor, something physical. If a meter won’t come back after the basics, that’s your signal it may need a closer look.
When you’ve worked the checklist and it’s still not fixed
I’ll be direct. You can’t solve every one of these issues alone. That’s the whole reason ION Assist™ exists.
If you’ve gone through the checklist – gateway, router, meter – and something’s still offline, reach out. This is the “head-scratcher” territory I mentioned in my first post. I guarantee I’ve seen your situation before, and can usually tell you in a few minutes what will take a lot longer to diagnose on your own. That’s what I and my team are here for.
You can reach us through chat in ION Control™, by email, or by phone or text. Whatever’s easiest for you.
Once your devices are healthy, your leak data is good to go and that’s where the real savings start to show up. Next up: the questions Paul and I hear most, week after week, from teams just like yours.
