How to Monitor Remote Water Troughs Without Driving the Paddocks Every Day

GPS-pinned LoRa water trough sensors that report level, alert on low water, and run for months on battery. Stop doing the daily trough run by ute.
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If your property has twenty troughs spread across a few thousand hectares, checking them all is a half-day job — and it’s a half-day you repeat every day because the cost of missing a dry trough is measured in stock weight, stress, and mortality.

Here’s how we designed the OGLAS Water Trough Level sensor to make that drive optional.

The problem with “just check them daily”

  • Time: Twenty troughs at five minutes each (including the drive between paddocks) is nearly two hours a day. Over a year, that’s 700+ hours — basically a month of full-time work.
  • Reaction time: If a trough runs dry at 10am and you check it at 4pm, the stock have been without water for six hours. On a hot day, that’s a welfare issue.
  • False security: “I checked them all this morning” becomes a reason not to worry — right up until the float valve sticks at 10:30am.

What the sensor does

  • Reports level periodically — default once an hour, configurable down to minutes during commissioning
  • Raises an immediate out-of-water alert — independent of the reporting interval, this message does not wait
  • Includes GPS coordinates with every reading, so the hub knows which trough is low without you maintaining a node-name-to-paddock spreadsheet
  • Reports its own battery voltage so you replace before failure

Why GPS matters

Twenty troughs means twenty node names, twenty positions, and twenty entries in a spreadsheet somewhere that nobody updates when a trough gets moved. Miss one update and “trough-7 is low” becomes a guessing game.

With GPS, the trough self-reports its location every cycle. The hub plots the troughs on a map. “The trough at -38.51, 145.20 has dropped to 80 mm” — actionable without a paper map.

Battery life: the design constraint

Remote troughs are usually a long way from power. The sensor is built around battery life:

  • Ultra-low-power hardware for minimal deep-sleep current
  • Deep sleep between cycles — GPS, radio, and level sensor fully powered down
  • Confirm-then-sleep — wake, read, get a GPS fix, send, wait briefly for confirmation, sleep
  • Under 30 seconds of active time per hour

A single 2000 mAh cell with a small solar trickle runs year-round.

Pair it with a Smart Switch

If a trough drops below threshold, the Smart Switch at the pump turns on and fills it — automatically. The sensor reports the low; the switch acts on it; the hub logs both. No human in the loop for a routine refill.

Water trough sensors are in the OGLAS sensor catalogue. Get in touch if you’ve got a property-full of troughs you’d rather not drive to every day.