Field Service Technician Tim Kelley’s wife doesn’t fully understand what he does at work. Few people do; he tells her. The MPW Industrial Water systems he maintains at new power plant near Wellsville, Ohio are invisible to most people, yet indispensable to what happens inside the modern facility.
MPW’s industrial water treatment equipment provides the ultra-pure water the power plant requires to operate.
Kelley is the one boots-on-the-ground technician who handles inspections, adjustments, troubleshooting, testing, and maintenance. Although MPW’s industrial water equipment requires design, engineering, monitoring, and support from a full team, in most cases there is only one technician who physically visits and maintains a site.
All the behind-the-scenes coordination, remote monitoring, parts sourcing, and technical support feed into what Kelley does every day to keep the systems running.
Kelley oversees several critical systems on site, including an ultrafilter (UF) trailer, a reverse osmosis (RO) container, service-exchange deionization (SDI) bottles mounted on the RO system, and a lab container for in-field testing.
The industrial water equipment that Tim Kelley oversees acts like a super-intensive water cleaning system for the power plant. The ultrafilter trailer works as a very fine screen, catching particles, organics, and debris large enough to be harmful downstream. After that, the reverse osmosis container forces water through a very tight membrane, stripping out dissolved minerals and salts that would otherwise corrode or scale pipes and turbines.
Then the SDI (service exchange deionization) bottles polish the water even further by removing residual charged particles, essentially giving it a final “rinse” to reach ultra-clean water quality.
The lab container is where all the testing happens. Kelley checks things like how well electricity passes through the water (conductivity), how cloudy it is (turbidity), acidity or alkalinity (pH), and the level of silica. If any reading drifts out of spec, he tweaks chemical dosing, pressure, or flow until things stabilize. The goal is to deliver water so clean that it won’t damage the plant’s critical systems, protecting against hidden issues before they become costly failures.
Each morning, Kelley meets with plant operations and reviews alarms and system status. He inspects the UF and RO units, checks chemical containment, runs lab analyses, performs maintenance (filter changes, membrane cleanings, flow and pressure adjustments) and logs every detail into MPW’s Phoenix tracking software. “I calibrate, compare, and find what’s off,” he said. “Every decision needs documentation.”
Kelley’s work carries real urgency. “You can’t let things drift,” he said. “If silica creeps upward, it ruins turbines. If chlorine values wander, membranes suffer.” The plant simply cannot tolerate impurity.
“The hardest part is responding to alarms after hours,” Kelley says. “I could be out hunting or fishing, away from signal, and get a critical alert.” Some alarms are harmless, but others demand immediate action. “You’ve got to choose your battles,” he said.
Despite the demands, Kelley finds real satisfaction in the autonomy and impact of his work. “I helped to take a site that was inconsistent and made it reliable,” he says. “I like the autonomy. It’s my territory. When things run smoothly, I know I’ve done my job.”