The stock trough water level sensor, explained.

A stock trough water level sensor watches each trough and tells you before stock go without water. It catches a dry trough, a leak, a stuck float or a stopped pump, and sends it to your phone. A summer water failure in the far paddock stops being something you find on the next drive-round.

Last updated 1 July 2026 · by Alien IT Solutions

The short version

A stock trough water level sensor measures how much water is in the trough and sends the reading to one dashboard over a low-power wireless link. It learns the normal pattern of the trough filling and stock drawing it down, so it can tell ordinary drinking apart from a real fault and alert you the moment something is wrong.

A dry trough in summer is one of the fastest ways to lose stock, and the trough is usually the part of the water system nobody is watching. The tank has a gauge. The pump makes a noise. The trough sits quietly at the end of a line half a kilometre away, and the first sign of trouble is often cattle standing over it.

Why troughs are the weak point

Everything upstream can be fine and the trough can still fail.

A trough depends on a chain: a full tank, a working pump, an open line, and a float valve that opens and closes. Any one link can break and the water stops. The tank runs dry. The pump trips on a hot afternoon and nobody hears it. A line splits, or an animal knocks a fitting. The float sticks shut and starves the trough, or sticks open and drains the tank into the paddock overnight.

None of that shows up until you drive out and look. On a big run, that might be every second or third day. In a heatwave, second or third day is too late. Stock can go through a lot of water in a single hot afternoon, and once a mob has emptied a trough the losses come quickly. The trough is the last metre of the whole system, and it is the metre with no eyes on it.

What it catches

The failures that cost you stock, before they cost you stock.

A trough running dry

A low-level alert when the water drops past the line you set, so you act before the trough is empty rather than after.

A leak or stuck float

An abnormal drain pattern, a trough that overflows, or one that keeps calling for water and never settles, flagged by the shape of the curve, not just the number.

A stopped pump or empty tank

If the tank feeding the trough is empty or the pump has stopped, the trough stops refilling. You hear about it early, while there is still water in the trough.

The far paddock troughs

The ones with no signal that nobody drives past daily are exactly the ones the system watches, over the low-power wireless link.

How it tells a leak from a thirsty mob

This is the part that matters, because a sensor that just yells whenever the level is low is useless. The level is meant to move. Stock drink; the trough refills. If every dip triggered an alert you would ignore the alerts inside a week, which is the same as having none.

The trick is the shape of the curve, not the number. Stock drinking looks like a level that falls through the day and climbs back as the float lets more water in from the tank. It is choppy, it follows the heat, and it always settles. A leak or a stuck float draws a different picture: a slow, steady drop overnight when nothing is drinking, or a trough that keeps calling for water and never sits still. The sensor watches that pattern over days and alerts on the abnormal shape. That is what stops the false alarms and lets you trust the ones you get.

How it works

A sensor on each trough

The sensor measures the water and runs for a long time on its own power, sealed against stock, weather and muck. No cable to the trough, no mains to run out to the paddock.

Readings sent back wirelessly

Readings travel over a low-power wireless link back to a base unit near the house, reaching the back paddocks a mobile signal cannot. Troughs beyond that range can report by satellite instead.

One dashboard, with alerts

Every trough and tank on one screen, with run-dry and leak alerts by SMS, email or push, plus the history to spot a trough that keeps playing up.

Off-grid, off-signal, and left alone

The whole point is a trough you do not have to visit to check. That means two things have to hold: power and reach.

Power is handled by keeping the sensor low-draw and letting it sleep between readings, so it runs on its own battery for a long stretch rather than needing a cable trenched out to the paddock. Reach is handled by not relying on the mobile network at the trough itself. The reading hops over a low-power wireless link back to a base unit near the house, which is where the internet connection lives. That is how a trough in a dead-signal gully still lands on your phone. For the outliers that sit past any practical range, a satellite link reports straight up from the trough.

Set it up right once and it should sit there and work. That is the standard to hold it to: it earns its keep by being the thing you stop thinking about.

Who builds it

Tank Monitoring is the water-monitoring service of Alien IT Solutions, an Australian IT, networks and connectivity company with more than 18 years of experience. We monitor troughs alongside the tanks, bores and dams that feed them, all on the one dashboard, because a trough alert is only useful if you can see the tank behind it. It is part of a family of rural services, all Alien IT: Rural IoT for other sensors such as gates and pumps, Paddock Networks for whole-property wifi, Long Range WiFi for long links, and Starlink Rural for satellite internet.

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