OPW Fuel Management Text Alerts: How to Get SMS Notifications From Your Fuel System

OPW Fuel Management Text Alerts: How to Get SMS Notifications From Your Fuel System

· by Sam Greenspan

OPW’s SiteSentinel consoles can track everything happening underground at your fuel site: tank levels, water intrusion, leak test results, probe failures, deliveries, theft detection, and a ton of other things (including the very one you’re thinking of now that somehow I forgot).

That’s a lot of data, and pretty much all of it matters.

But… most of it lives on the console screen or buried in an email inbox.

So when you get an alarm email from your SiteSentinel and it lands right alongside vendor invoices, compliance paperwork, and the email from your mom because she still hasn’t figured out she should send to your personal Gmail — nothing about it screams “look at me right now.”

A text message does.

So that’s why we’re here: To get your OPW fuel management system to send you real SMS texts when something at the site needs attention. And to do it without an long, drawn-out, complicated, expensive process.

I’ll take you through the setup, which only takes about ten minutes and works with every SiteSentinel model that can send email.

Let’s go…

OPW Fuel Management Text Alerts: Table of Contents

How to Set Up OPW SiteSentinel Text Alerts Through Your Existing Email Path

Here’s how we’re going to get text alerts, using an email-to-text option that slides right into your current setup.

Sign up at text.email

text.email takes emails and turns them into text messages. You send an email to an address based on your phone number, and it shows up on your phone as a regular text.

You don’t need an app or any extra hardware. Go to text.email and create an account.

You’ll get a special email address you can use for email-to-SMS. (It will be like yournumber@yourprivatekeyword.text.email).

Make sure your SiteSentinel has network and SMTP set up

Your console needs two things before any of this works: an internet connection and an SMTP mail server.

For the network side, head to Settings > System > Networking on your SiteSentinel and confirm you’re on LAN/WAN. If you’re running an Integra, that’s Configuration > System > Networking.

If you’ve been getting emails from the console at all, this is probably already done.

Next, go to Settings > System > Email & SMS. On an Integra, that’s Configuration > System > Email & SMS.

The Integra sidebar might show it as “Email & SM” because the label gets cut off in the nav, but you’re in the right place.

The top half of this screen is your SMTP setup. Here’s what goes in each field:

  • Server Name: your SMTP server hostname
  • Port Number: usually 587 or 465
  • Username and Password for authentication
  • SiteSentinel Email Address: the “from” address your console will use when it sends alerts
  • Check SMTP Server Authentication if your mail server requires it (most do)

If your site doesn’t have its own mail server, OPW actually recommends SMTP2GO (smtp2go.com) as a third-party relay. Works fine for this.

Add a text.email contact to your Address Book

Now go to Settings > Address Book and hit the Add button. On an Integra, that’s Configuration > Address Book > Add.

The contact form has the usual stuff: name, company, phone, fax, plus separate fields for Email and SMS.

Important: put your text.email address in the Email field, not the SMS field.

So if your phone number is 212-555-1234, you’d type 2125551234@yourkeyword.text.email in the Email line.

Why the Email field and not SMS? Because the SMS field routes through OPW’s Clickatell integration, which has its own problems (we’ll get into those later).

The Email field sends through your SMTP server, and text.email handles the email to text conversion on the other end.

Give the contact a name you’ll recognize later. Something like “SMS – Mike” or “Text Alert – Night Manager” keeps things clear when you’re picking contacts from a list.

Point your tank alarms at that contact

Now go to Settings > Alarm Actions, pick a tank, and hit Details.

You’ll see columns for each notification type. Click the person icon under the Email column and select your text.email contact from the Address Book. Then hit Apply.

Yeah, it says “Email” in the column header. That’s fine. Your SiteSentinel thinks it’s sending an email, and it is. text.email just turns it into a text on the receiving end.

You can assign up to five email contacts per alarm action, so if multiple people need texts, create a separate Address Book entry for each phone number.

Optional: Set up system-level alerts too

Tank alarms are just one category. Your SiteSentinel also fires alerts for equipment issues: power failures, probe communication errors, backup battery warnings, and so on.

To get those as texts, go to Settings > System > Preferences > Warnings. On an Integra, Configuration > System > Preferences > Warnings.

Same approach. You’ll see a grid of system events with notification columns. Click the person icon under Email for each event you care about, select your text.email contact, and Apply.

One thing to watch for: there’s an Apply button for individual rows and a separate one for the whole table at the bottom. Make sure you hit both.

Test it before you trust it

Obviously, before you rely on this for your real alarms, you’re going to want to see it work.

The fastest way is to send an email to your text.email address (like 2125551234@yourkeyword.text.email) from any email client, just to confirm that side of the pipe is flowing.

Then trigger a test alarm on your SiteSentinel. It’s probably best to temporarily set a product-low threshold above your current level so it trips right away, then set it back after.

You should get a text within a few seconds. If nothing shows up, check your SMTP settings. Usually it’s the “from” address on your SiteSentinel not being recognized by the SMTP provider.

What Happened to the SiteSentinel’s Built-In SMS Options?

Your SiteSentinel does technically have SMS built in. If you’ve looked at the bottom half of that Email & SMS screen, you’ve seen the fields.

But both native options have pretty much aged into dead ends.

Dead: The Clickatell gateway

OPW’s SMS integration is hardcoded to a single third-party provider called Clickatell. The fields are right there on the Email & SMS screen: Gateway Address, User, Password, API ID.

The iSite manual actually spells it “Clickatel” with one L, which gives you a sense of how much attention this feature has gotten over the years.

To use it, you’d need a Clickatell account on their legacy HTTP API. But Clickatell has likely deprecated that legacy gateway platform and stopped creating new accounts for it.

If you had an account before the deprecation, it might still work (though it probably won’t, based on some of the things around modern text regulations we’ll discuss shortly). But if you’re setting this up fresh today, this path probably isn’t available.

And even if you could get in, you’d be building on a deprecated API that will disappear entirely at some point in the near-ish future.

Alive, but perilous: The GSM modem option

The other native SMS path is a physical GSM modem connected to one of your SiteSentinel’s serial ports. You’d need the modem itself, a SIM card, and a cellular plan.

Then you’d check the “Use GSM Modem” box in each Address Book contact.

It works, technically. But do you really want to maintain a whole separate piece of cellular hardware on site just to get a handful of critical alerts on your phone?

That’s a lot of overhead and a really fragile, hardware-intensive setup for something that really should be simple.

Dead: Cell phone carrier gateways

There used to be a completely different workaround that may sound vaguely familiar to you. Every major cell phone carrier ran email-to-SMS gateways, where you’d email an address like 2125551234@txt.att.net and it’d arrive as a text.

Plenty of fuel sites had these gateway addresses saved in their SiteSentinel Address Books for years.

The carriers shut all of them down. AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and the rest — all gone. If you had one in your system, your alerts have been vanishing silently.

Overkill: DIY texting setups

You could build your own SMS pipeline with something like Twilio. But that’s a new system you have to maintain and make sure it doesn’t break.

Plus, every cell phone carrier now require something called A2P 10DLC registration for any application-to-person texting. If you don’t have it, your texts will not be delivered.

That means registering your brand, registering your campaign, paying carrier fees, and waiting weeks for approval.

It’s a regulatory framework designed for companies sending thousands of marketing texts, not for a fuel site manager who needs to know when a leak test fails.

text.email handles all of that on their end. You just use the email address.

Get OPW Fuel Management Text Alerts Without the Enterprise Overhead

So this is all you need to get text messages for critical alerts — and to get them going today.

You can kick off the process right now by signing up at text.email, getting your email-to-text address, and then plugging it into your system.

text.email plans include 200 messages per month… through really, you’re not paying by quantity (since you probably won’t have anywhere close to 200 critical alerts in a month). This is all about the moment where you actually find out instantly when something went wrong at the site.

Want to try it out? You can do that for free, just send an email to yournumber@text.email (with your actual 10-digit number) and see it arrive as a text.

Leak Tests, Tank Levels, and Probe Failures: Which OPW Alerts Deserve a Text?

Not everything your SiteSentinel reports needs to buzz your phone.

Here are some quick suggestions for how split your OPW alerts between text and email. (Your picks will be different based on your site and your role, because I don’t know you personally, but this will hopefully get you started.)

Always text these:

  • Product High-High / Product Low-Low: critical level alarms that can trigger pump shutoffs
  • Water High-High: water at critical levels
  • In-Tank Leak Test Failure: a failed leak test can’t wait
  • LLD Leak Test Failed (0.1 GPH and 0.2 GPH): line leak detection failures
  • Theft: product leaving the tank while the site is closed
  • Power Fail: your console lost power
  • Probe Failure: you’re blind on that tank until it’s fixed
  • VSmart / OM4 / LIM Comms Failure: lost communication with field hardware

Probably fine as email:

  • Product High / Product Low: early warnings, not emergencies
  • Water High: worth knowing, not critical yet
  • Delivery Start/Finish: useful for reconciliation, not urgent
  • Density Variation Warning: worth investigating on your own timeline
  • Printer Failure: unless event printing is a compliance requirement for you
  • Open/Close Site: routine operational events
  • Temperature alarms: depends on your product and your climate

The SiteSentinel also has escalation alarms. If nobody acknowledges a critical alarm within a set time window, it can bump the notification to a second contact, then a third.

That escalation works through the same Email column, so your text.email contacts slot right in.

If you’re also running a Veeder-Root TLS system at another site, the same email-to-text approach works there too.

Start Getting OPW Fuel Management Text Alerts Right Now

Everything you need for quick text alerts is already on your OPW’s SiteSentinel — you’re just putting a text.email address where an email address used to go.

So sign up at text.email, add your address to the SiteSentinel Address Book, and point it at your critical alarms.

That way, the next time a probe drops or a leak test comes back bad, you’ll get know immediately — and won’t miss it — thanks to a text.

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Send an email to
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