Evoltix hosted a live conversation with Scott Tampke, VP of Sales and Marketing, and Bernie Dugan, Sales Engineer, on how tower operators and public safety agencies can cut reactive site visits without increasing risk. If you missed it, or want just the highlights, here is a short recap.
Why Evoltix Started With the Sites Nobody Else Wanted
Tampke traced the company’s origin back to 2017, when Evoltix (then HCI Energy) struggled to get anyone to trust a new vendor with mission-critical power. The market that took a chance was the one everyone else avoided: off-grid sites on top of mountains and in places a technician cannot reach without a helicopter or a snowmobile.
“Your system’s only as good as the communication it gives to the customer on its condition,” Tampke said of what those early deployments taught the company. When the nearest hardware store is four hours away, and the only way in is by air, a power system that fails silently is not just an inconvenience, but a multi-day problem.
Dugan pointed to the same lesson from the field side: those extreme environments forced a level of monitoring and redundancy that most on-grid sites never had to develop. A site a technician can only reach by helicopter does not get the luxury of a routine truck roll to check on things. Evoltix built its monitoring and redundancy standards to survive that reality because it had no other option, then found that on-grid public safety and telecom operators wanted the same visibility once they saw it.
Alerting and Alarming Are Not the Same Thing
Tampke drew a distinction worth sitting with: alarming tells you something has already failed. Alerting tells you a site is trending toward failure before it gets there. Most legacy backup power only does the first one.
A power system that only alarms is telling you about yesterday’s problem. One that alerts is giving you next week’s schedule.
If you’re interested in learning more about alerting, check out “What Is Remote Power Monitoring for Tower Sites?”.
Lead Time: From Six Months to Thirty Days
Tampke put a typical UPS or DC power plant order at six months or more before a customer even starts configuring it once it arrives. The ZPM ships in about a month, built on what Tampke called an 80% build philosophy: roughly 80% of every unit is identical regardless of what a customer orders, with the remaining 20% (energy storage capacity and power conversion sizing) configured to the site.
Dugan connected that back to a problem most operators have lived with without naming it: when a system arrives as parts instead of a finished unit, someone has to assemble it correctly in the field, possibly hours from the nearest supplier if a part is missing. A pre-built, pre-tested unit removes that variable entirely. It shows up ready to commission, not ready to be figured out. Dugan also noted that once a customer runs an initial commissioning alongside the Evoltix field service team, the learning curve mostly disappears. The second site goes faster than the first, and the tenth goes faster still, because every unit shares the same underlying build.
Want to learn more?
Watch the full recording here, or talk through what any of this looks like for your own network with one of our experts.
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