Water control & safety
How DockNeighbor bounds water damage on a city-water hookup: a hard limit on every valve open, and an automatic shutoff on top.
Water protection systems get sold on their most dramatic feature — “it closes your valve!” — and that framing is backwards. DockNeighbor’s protection is layered, and the layer that matters most is the least glamorous one: the valve never opens without a limit. Understand the layers and you’ll know exactly what you’re protected against, and what you’re not.
Layer 1 — the open limit (the primary safeguard)
Every command that opens the LinkTap valve carries a volume or duration limit. There is no “just open it indefinitely” — every open is bounded. When the metered volume or elapsed time hits the limit, the valve closes on its own.
This is what physically bounds the worst case. If a hose bursts the moment you open the valve and every other layer fails — no sensors, no internet — the burst still ends when the limit is reached. You get a bounded, known quantity of water instead of an unbounded flood running until someone notices.
Set your default limit to match real usage: enough for a normal fill or a day’s hookup use, and no more. A limit sized “generously, just in case” is a limit that does less for you on the day it matters.
Layer 2 — the automatic flood shutoff
A flood alarm from any DockNeighbor leak or float sensor reaches the cloud through the station, and the cloud closes the valve — with your app closed and you nowhere near the boat. The same alarm pushes to your phone, and to the friends you marked if you don’t acknowledge it.
To be clear about what this layer is: it’s a fast-reaction layer on top of the hard limit — it stops the water when the leak is detected instead of when the limit runs out. It is not the thing standing between your boat and the bottom of the marina. That job belongs to the limit (layer 1) and to your boat’s own equipment (see the warning below).
What happens if…
Honest failure analysis. In every row, notice which safeguard survives: the limit.
| Scenario | What still protects you | What you lose |
|---|---|---|
| Internet goes down | The open limit — it travels with the open command, so a session already running still ends at its limit. The station keeps hearing the sensors and catches the cloud up. | New valve commands, including the automatic shutoff, and alerts, until it’s back. |
| No valve (Free or Dockside) | Flood alarms still reach your phone the moment a sensor gets wet, on every plan. | There is no valve to open or close. Weekender adds partner devices, including the valve. |
| App closed, Weekender or Voyager | The automatic shutoff closes the valve and pushes an alert; the limit still bounds everything. | Nothing — this is the away-from-the-boat configuration. |
| Flood sensor battery dead | The open limit — it doesn’t depend on sensors at all. | Early detection: no flood signal means no automatic shutoff. Check sensor batteries as part of seasonal maintenance. |
| The valve’s gateway loses power or Wi-Fi | The limit travels with the open command, so a session already running still ends at its limit. | New commands (including remote or automatic closes) wait until the gateway is back. |
The pattern: detection layers can fail — batteries die, connections drop, plans lapse. The limit can’t be forgotten, because the app never sends an open without one. That’s why it’s the primary safeguard and the shutoff is described as a layer on top.
Leaving the boat
- Short trips, hooked up: keep the limit tight and rely on the automatic shutoff and its push alert.
- Longer absences: the strongest move is the oldest one — close the valve at the spigot. A closed valve has no failure modes. DockNeighbor then tells you if water shows up anyway (bilge, plumbing, rain intrusion).
- Any absence: make sure the valve is at the source spigot, not the boat’s inlet — otherwise the hose is outside your protection entirely. See valve placement.
Flow metering and abnormal use
Because the valve meters flow, DockNeighbor isn’t limited to all-or-nothing protection. Abnormal continuous flow — water running when your usage pattern says it shouldn’t be — trips the valve and shuts water off at the source. Combined with a sensible open limit, that catches the slow failures (a weeping fitting, a stuck toilet valve) that never touch a flood sensor’s probes.