Let’s start with the basics. The core tasks that will get your job set and ready for monitoring. This is your fastest path off of paper and into a reliable, repeatable process. Before we jump right into Hydro, make sure that you’ve set up and documented the affected and unaffected rooms in the property. We’ll be using these in Hydro to create our drying chambers. If you’re not sure how to do this, we recommend watching the Field Documentation Basics video. From the home page of the job, click the Hydro button to open up the Hydro job dashboard and let’s get started by opening up the task list. The first thing we’ll do is capture the source of loss and select the category of water at the source. This creates a clear record of the loss and the type of water. Keep notes short, If hazards like mold or asbestos are present, document them here so your team and stakeholders have the full picture. Next, we’ll set up your drying chamber. Open the Drying chamber task. Be sure to add both the affected and unaffected rooms that are inside the drying chamber. This ensures that your overall chamber volume is accurate, which is essential for future calculations. Depending on the size and type of job, you might have multiple drying chambers to set up. Keep adding chambers here until you’ve got them all set up and then click Complete Task to unlock the rest of the task list. Now we’ll capture some important baseline readings. For exterior readings, Hydro can automatically fetch temperature and humidity from a nearby weather station. Or you can walk outside, snap a photo of your meter and enter the reading values manually. Click Save. Then go ahead and take an unaffected area reading. Choose a dry, undisturbed room inside the structure. This gives you a baseline point of comparison for interior conditions that aren’t impacted by the water damage. Click Save on this task and you’ve now completed those two tasks. We’re going to skip over the Unaffected Area HVAC reading task for now. This will be covered later in the video, under Advanced Features. With your chamber set up and your baselines captured, it’s time to set your dry standards. Dry standards help you determine when wet materials like drywall, wood, flooring and so on are considered dry. In a similarly unaffected area of the property, open the task, select the material, take a meter photo, enter the reading and confirm the meter type. If the meter doesn’t match what you’re using, click Change and select the right meter from the list. When you’re finished, Click Save. Repeat this process until you have a dry standard for every wet material on the job. To help you track drying progress, Hydro automatically calculates drying goals by applying a drying variance of ten percent to your dry standards. You’re going to start taking readings in the wet affected areas now. For each drying chamber you created earlier, you’ll see a set of tasks to complete, labeled with the corresponding drying chamber name. Open the Affected Area Reading task. Choose a room in the chamber and take your readings there consistently each visit. Snap your meter photo, enter temperature and humidity and save. You may see a High Humidity alert. That’s expected early in the job. We’re going to skip over the affected area HVAC reading task for now. This will be covered later in the video under Advanced Features. We’re also going to skip right over Dimensions and Moisture mapping tasks to get to moisture points. This is one of the great things about Hydro. You’ve got a list of tasks, but you’re free to jump around and get the tasks completed in the order that makes the most sense for the job at hand. Just like your air readings, you want to track moisture content readings in the same place each time. Creating moisture points establishes a repeatable location for measuring, monitoring and recording the drying process of wet materials. You can place moisture points with or without a Moisture Map. For the purpose of this video, we’ll do it without the map. In the Advanced Features section later, we’ll circle back to show you how to place the moisture points on a map. Open the task. Select the room and material. Then place your moisture point and record the reading, just like your other tasks. You’ll have the option to add the Surface Temperature reading as well. We recommend using a piece of painter’s tape on the wall to label your moisture points the same way they are labeled in Encircle. This is an easy way to ensure that whoever is taking readings on later visits will always go to the same area each time. One way to speed up the process is through our Tramex integration. If you are using a Tramex Bluetooth meter, Hydro will pull the reading automatically after you snap the photo. No typing required. Once your moisture points are captured, document your equipment placement. Open the Equipment placement task, select the room and add units like dehumidifiers, air movers or scrubbers. Use the plus buttons on the right to place the units. Repeat for each room. Then click Place. Click the back arrow to return to the task list. If you want to learn about using the Hydro Equipment calculator to get an S500 compliant equipment recommendation, that will be covered in the Advanced Features part of this video. Lastly, it’s time to capture dehumidifier readings. Open the task, select a room, and then select the unit you’re taking the readings from. The purpose of this task is to capture the output readings on your dehumidifier to make sure it’s functioning properly. If your dehue has an output display, snap a photo of it and enter the reading into Hydro. Alternatively, you can take a hygrometer reading from the unit’s exhaust. Just snap your photo, enter your readings. If your unit has an hour meter, take a photo of that too and log the hours running. Keeping these hourly records is powerful proof when charges are questioned or conditions change. And that’s it! You’ve completed the core documentation you need to get the job started right. Make sure you always click Complete to finish the job setup. From here, the Hydro task list makes daily monitoring simple. Each visit, you’ll open your Task List, update your readings, check your equipment and respond to any alerts you see. When the job is complete, remove your equipment in Hydro to capture the pickup date for your report. Hydro gives you a consistent, easy, repeatable process to get you the kind of documentation that holds up under scrutiny. The Hydro Job Review dashboard gives you a single place to see everything happening on the job. And because data syncs in real time, you can check-in from anywhere, whether you are in the office, in the truck or at another job site, you can review readings, see what equipment is placed and make sure that small issues don’t turn into big, expensive problems later. Project managers and supervisors love this because it lets them stay connected to the job without having to be on-site, keeping the whole team aligned and accountable. Hydro includes built in alerts to help you stay on top of changing conditions. Alerts trigger automatically when key measurements fall outside your specified tolerances. Things like high relative humidity, temperature swings, a low dew point differential, or when your equipment may be undersized for the job. When an alert triggers, you’ll see a pop up immediately, and that alert will also be visible in the Job Review dashboard, the task list, and on the reading screens. Each alert includes helpful suggestions for what to do next, like adding a dehumidifier, turning on heat, or checking airflow. Promptly responding to alerts helps you to stay proactive and keeps the drying process moving efficiently. After drying is complete, make sure to remove the equipment from the job. This is important for your equipment log. You can easily do this from the Hydro dashboard. Open the Equipment page. Tap the three dots at the top right and select Remove all equipment. This ensures your equipment logs are accurate, which is critical when billing for the job later. When it’s time to share your documentation, whether it’s a daily update or a final invoice package, Hydro makes it easy to create professional moisture reports. You can choose from several report types depending on what you need to show. The Hydro Full Report includes every reading from every day along with all meter photos. It’s perfect for detailed compliance reviews or program jobs. The Hydro Summary Report is a lighter version that shows the first and last two days of readings, with fewer photos ideal when you want a quick overview for a homeowner or adjuster. The Hydro Equipment Report gives you a detailed log of every piece of equipment you placed and removed, including runtime hours. This is great when you need to justify equipment charges on an invoice, And the Hydro Carrier Report uses a format that many carriers prefer, helping to eliminate back and forth and speed up payment. You can also embed Hydro data directly into your Encircle PDF report to keep everything in one polished, professional document. No matter which report you choose, they’re clear, defensible and designed to get you paid faster. With Job Review, Alerts and reporting, Hydro gives you the tools to monitor jobs in real time, respond quickly to changing conditions, deliver professional documentation that’s easy to share. These features not only help you stay in control of the job, they help your company reduce disputes, get invoices approved and close jobs with confidence. The best way to learn Encircle is to get out there and use it! Our Help Center and our Support team are here for you to answer any questions that come up.

Once you’ve mastered the basics and feel confident with your daily monitoring, it’s time to explore Hydro’s advanced tasks. These features aren’t required to get started, but they can help you get even more value out of Hydro by tightening up your process, optimizing your drying plan, and creating even stronger documentation for your files. Unaffected area HVAC readings are all about protecting the clean, dry spaces in the property. If the HVAC system is running, it’s possible for humid air from the wet areas to get pulled through the system and pushed into unaffected rooms. That can slow down the drying process on the job. Or worse—cause secondary damage and mold growth where there wasn’t a problem before. Open the Unaffected Area HVAC Reading task. Select the room in which you want to take the reading. Indicate whether there’s an HVAC system to monitor. If you select No, you will skip this task for the rest of the job. If you select Yes, you’ll take a reading here and then capture this reading on every monitoring visit going forward. Click Add Meter Photo. Hold your meter up to the vent, and just like the rest of your readings, take a picture, enter temperature and relative humidity, and save. Taking this measurement helps you prove that unaffected areas stayed truly dry, and that your HVAC system wasn’t spreading moisture during the job. Affected Area HVAC readings tell whether the HVAC system is helping or hurting the conditions inside your drying chamber. If the system is running, it could help by circulating dry air, or work against you by adding humidity or cooling the space too much. Open the Affected Area HVAC reading task. Select the room you’re monitoring and whether or not you’ll be monitoring the HVAC system there. Take your reading, snap a meter photo, and enter the reading data. Click Save. Hydro will save this so you can see if the system is impacting drying over time. Capturing this data helps you explain unexpected changes in temperature or humidity, adjust your drying plan if needed, and justify any additional equipment you place to overcome environmental challenges. Moisture mapping is one of the best ways to visually tell the story of a water loss. It shows where water damage is present, where your readings are being taken, and where your equipment has been placed. This visual record helps everyone understand the job at a glance—from project managers to adjusters. Open the Room Moisture Map task. Choose a room and select how you want to create your map. There are several ways to create your Moisture Map. We recommend using your Encircle Floor Plan after it has finished processing. Crop the room from the Floor Plan. Click Save. Then open up the Moisture Map. Next, draw in the water. For this, click Draw and select the Freehand tool. Use your finger to trace the shape of the water. You can also place the moisture points and equipment that you set up earlier onto your map. Click Place. Then choose Place Existing. For both the equipment and the moisture points, you’ll choose Place All. We’ll do our Moisture points first. Switch into Move mode. Then drag the icons to their respective positions on the map. Now, we’ll repeat those steps for our equipment. When you’re done, you’ll have a clear picture of the affected areas. This makes your reports easier to read and gives you professional documentation that backs up your decisions on the job. Open the Room Dimensions task and select the room you’re working on. The room will default to a rectangle shape, but you can change this by tapping on the rectangle. You can choose from a few standard room shapes, or select Other if you’ve got a non-standard room with curved walls, bay windows, a polygonal shape and so on. If you’re working with one of the standard room shapes, make sure to enter the room dimensions and ceiling height. Rectangular rooms will ask for a simple length, width and height. More complex room shapes will prompt you for each wall measurement. If you’ve opted for a custom shape, you’ll be entering the total floor area, total perimeter, number of walls and ceiling height. Once you’ve entered your room dimensions, you’ll indicate the percentage of each surface that was affected: floor, walls and ceiling. Hydro uses this data to calculate the chamber volume, and will later use it to recommend the right amount of equipment. Please note that the affected wall measurement is for walls that are affected above the 2ft mark, as determined by the S500 standard. So, if your walls are not affected above two feet, you can leave this field blank. Next enter any insets, offsets, or obstructions larger than eighteen inches. Then click Complete. Make sure to enter the measurements for each room in the chamber, including the unaffected ones, as they count toward your total chamber size. Accurate measurements not only lead to accurate equipment calculations, they also give adjusters the information they need to understand the overall scope of the loss and approve work without delays. Once your chamber dimensions are entered, it’s a good idea to review your drying chamber settings. Up top, you’ll see the chamber name. Next, set the status of the chamber. A chamber can move through three phases: Stabilization, Drying, and finally, Dry Confirmed. Stabilization is used at the start of a job while you prepare the environment. During this phase, you shouldn’t be placing air movers, as they can spread contamination. Once the environment is stable, change the status to Drying. When all materials have reached their drying goals, you’ll update the status to Dry Confirmed. You’ll also see fields for Drying Start Date and Drying End Date. These dates are automatically time stamped when you update the chamber status, giving you an accurate record of how long the chamber spent in stabilization, in drying, and when it was confirmed dry. These details flow directly into your reports, helping you show clear timelines and job performance. Next you’ll see the rooms that make up the drying chamber. These can be edited here if needed. Review the category of water at the bottom of the screen and select the appropriate category. And if you plan to use the equipment calculator, make sure you’ve also chosen the correct class of water. Lastly, you have your Chamber Tolerances. Hydro uses the tolerances you set here to trigger alerts for things like high relative humidity, temperature swings, or a low dew point differential. The default settings work for most jobs, but if you are working under a strict program requirement or you want tighter control, you can adjust them here. Click Save when done. Now let’s look at the Equipment Calculator—one of the most powerful advanced tools in Hydro. Once you’ve got the chamber dimensions and the class of water entered, you can open the Equipment Calculator task. Here, you’ll answer some final details about the property: building density, building construction, the HVAC help the drying process, are the weather conditions favorable, and the building envelope. Click Calculate to get your recommendation. Hydro uses the S500 standard to recommend the number of dehumidifiers and air movers needed for the space, based on the category and class of water, construction type and chamber volume. This gives you a defensible, data-backed starting point for setting the job up properly. If conditions change during the drying process, you can re-run the calculator to see if additional equipment is required, or to justify pulling equipment when it’s no longer needed. Using these recommendations in your documentation also makes it easier for adjusters to see that your equipment charges are appropriate, which helps get your invoices approved faster, and in full. And that’s it for the advanced tasks in Hydro. These features give you more insight and more opportunity to make every water job more profitable. Even if you don’t use them every time, they’re available whenever you want to dial in your equipment strategy, visualize the job for an adjuster, or make sure you’re capturing every possible detail for documentation.