Lightning Took Down Their Scale Multiple Times a Year. Now It Doesn’t.

The Problem

Southwest Alabama Solid Waste depends on their truck scale for every load that moves through their facility. It’s their cash register that handles every inbound and outbound transaction. When the scale goes down, operations slow or stop.

 Alabama’s Gulf Coast storm season is not gentle, and their location gets hit by lightning a lot. The scale’s electronics couldn’t handle repeated lightning exposure. Load cells, circuit boards, and internal components were failing after every major storm. System Scale Mobile was always quick to respond, but even same-day response still meant at least a full day of downtime while parts were sourced and installed. Specialty components don’t always ship overnight, and when lead times stretched, so did the outage.

Around 5 times a year, a storm came through, the scale went down, and the cycle repeated. Parts cost, labor cost, and at minimum a day of disrupted operations every single time.

The Fix

The Mobile team had the full repair history. They went through it with Teresa and the team at Southwest Alabama Solid Waste and built out the real cost picture: parts per event, labor per event, days of downtime per event, multiplied by 4 to 5 events a year. When they laid that total next to the cost of an upgraded system, the decision stopped being about capital spend and started being about math.

The new system is built differently. The architecture handles surge and lightning exposure at a level the prior system couldn’t match. It also runs tighter calibration tolerances out of the box.

SSC Mobile handled the full install in May 2024. No third-party hand-off. Same team that diagnosed the problem executed the fix and continues to maintain the scale.

“Bret and his team are amazing. They are always responsive and deliver service right away. They are always my first call when I’m in a panic.”
Teresa, Office Manager, Southwest Alabama Solid Waste

The Result

Zero trouble calls since the upgrade in May 2024. More than two years and not a single storm-related outage. The recurring board and load cell replacement cycle is gone. There was also a benefit Southwest Alabama didn’t anticipate: customer disputes tied to weighing discrepancies dropped from a handful per month to a rare occasion. The tighter tolerances in the new system were doing work the old one couldn’t.

Teresa described it directly: smoother operations, less panic, and confidence that the scale will be up. The SSC Mobile team still visits today, but now it’s only for regularly scheduled preventative maintenance and calibration.