Water Trough Level

The OGLAS Water Trough Level sensor is purpose-built for stock water — the troughs scattered across paddocks where animals depend on a working float valve and a charged pump. If a trough goes dry, you find out before the animals do.

What it does

• Reports level periodically — default interval an hour; configurable down to minutes when you’re commissioning, back up to once a day when you trust it.
• Raises an immediate out-of-water alert when level drops below a configured threshold — independent of the reporting interval. This is the message that matters and it doesn’t wait.
• Includes GPS coordinates with each reading, so the hub knows which trough this is without you having to track node-id-to-paddock mappings by hand.
• Reports battery voltage so you can replace the battery on schedule, not on failure.

Why GPS

A property with twenty troughs is a labelling nightmare. Without GPS:

• Every trough needs a unique node name and a written record of where each name lives.
• Move a trough and you have to remember to update the spreadsheet.
• Six months in, nobody can remember if trough-7 is the one in the south paddock or the back fence.

With GPS, the trough self-reports its location every cycle. The hub plots them on a map, and “trough-7 has dropped to 80 mm” becomes “the trough at -38.51, 145.20 has dropped to 80 mm” — actionable without a paper map.

GPS is only powered when needed (once per reporting cycle, briefly), so the power cost is modest.

Long battery life

Stock troughs are usually a long way from anything you can plug into. The Water Trough sensor is built around battery life as the dominant design constraint:

• Ultra-low deep-sleep current — full power-down of the GPS, the radio, and the level sensor between samples.
• Wake, read, send, sleep — wake, read level, get a GPS fix if it’s been long enough, send, wait briefly for confirmation, sleep. The whole cycle is under 30 seconds of activity per hour.
• Single LiPo + small solar panel — designed to run year-round on a single small panel. Without solar, a single 2000 mAh cell will run for months on hourly reports.

Level sensing

A handful of options depending on the install:

• Submerged pressure transducer — most accurate, works through algae and floating debris, but needs a wired probe in the water.
• Ultrasonic range finder mounted above the water surface — non-contact, easy to retrofit, but sensitive to spray and condensation.
• Float-and-magnet stick — cheapest, no electronics in the water, only good for “above/below threshold”.

The sensor publishes raw millimetres; the hub does the per-trough calibration (“at this trough, 200 mm = full, 50 mm = critical”).

Pairs well with

• Bell — out-of-water alert rings the homestead bell instantly.
• Smart Switch — trough drops below threshold, Smart Switch turns on the pump that fills it.
• Electric Fence — same long-battery, alert-priority, scattered-across-paddocks family.

Building this into a larger site? That’s exactly what we do — start a custom build or email us.