How to Set Up a Tank Monitor Alert for Livestock Water

The Difference Between Watching and Being Watched

A lot of people buy a tank monitor and use it mainly to check levels when they think to — a bit like checking your phone for messages rather than setting it up to notify you. That works as far as it goes, but it is not really using the technology for what it is good at. The real value of a remote tank monitor is not giving you a number to look at when you are already wondering about it. It is telling you about a problem before you would otherwise know it exists.

The difference between a level that is dropping normally and one that is dropping because of a leak or a failed pump is often only visible over a 6 to 12-hour period. If you check your app once a day you might catch it. If you check every few days — which is the reality on a busy property — you could have cattle without water for 24 hours before you know anything is wrong. Properly configured alerts fix that.

The Two Alerts Every Tank Should Have

The first and most obvious alert is a low level warning. This should be set at a level that gives you enough time to respond — and that means thinking through what response time looks like for your property. If your tanks are an hour away from the homestead and you have a full-time job off-farm on certain days, your low-level alert needs to trigger when you still have a day or more of water remaining, not when the tank is about to run out. For most livestock situations, an alert at 25 to 30 per cent of tank capacity is a reasonable starting point, but adjust it upward if your response time is long or your stock pressure is high.

The second alert is one many people overlook: an unexpected rate-of-change alert. This triggers not when the level has dropped below a threshold, but when it is dropping faster than normal. If your 10,000-litre tank normally drops 500 litres overnight and one night it drops 2,000 litres, that is almost certainly a leak or an overflowing trough with a stuck float, not normal consumption. A rate-of-change alert catches this at 2am rather than at 8am when you check the app over breakfast.

Sizing Your Alert Thresholds to Your Stock Numbers

A useful starting point for setting your low-level alert threshold is to calculate your daily water demand and work backwards. Cattle in hot conditions drink roughly 50 to 70 litres per head per day. Sheep in summer drink roughly 5 to 8 litres per head per day, more in very high temperatures. If you have 200 cattle on a paddock with a single 15,000-litre tank, your herd is potentially consuming 10,000 to 14,000 litres per day in summer. At that rate, a half-full tank is less than one day of supply.

Running that calculation makes it obvious why some of the conservative default alert settings — say, a low-level alert at 10 per cent — are almost useless in a high-stock situation. By the time the alert fires, you are already in crisis mode. Set your thresholds based on your actual stock numbers and the distance between your tank check and your ability to act.

Seasonal adjustment also matters. A threshold that gives you comfortable lead time in winter may be dangerously tight in a January heatwave when consumption doubles. Review your alert settings at the start of summer and adjust them for the higher demand period.

Detecting Leaks With a Flow Pattern Alert

Leaks in rural water systems are common and often go undetected for weeks. A small leak in a pipeline — a cracked fitting, a damaged float valve, a corroded joint — might only lose a few hundred litres per day, which is easy to miss if you are not looking for it. Over a month that adds up to several thousand litres, and in a drought that is real money and real animal welfare risk.

The most reliable way to catch a slow leak with a tank monitor is to track overnight consumption. Animals do not generally drink at night. If your tank is consistently dropping by 300 to 500 litres between 10pm and 6am when no stock are drinking, and that was not happening previously, you have a leak somewhere in the system. Set a baseline for your typical overnight drop rate — note it in your monitoring platform or keep a written record — and treat any consistent deviation from that baseline as a sign to investigate.

For pipelines feeding multiple tanks, a sudden unexplained drop in just one tank on the network is often the first sign of a localised leak. Your monitoring data effectively functions as a leak detection tool at no extra cost once the sensors are in place.

Setting Up Alerts in the BushLinx® Platform

In BushLinx®, tank level alerts are set per device and can be configured for high level, low level, and rate of change thresholds. You can choose to receive notifications by SMS, email, or both, and you can set different alert recipients for different times of day — useful if you want alerts to go to a farm manager during the day and directly to the owner after hours.

Once configured, the system monitors levels continuously and sends the alert as soon as the threshold is crossed. You do not need to be in the app. You do not need to be thinking about it. That is the whole point — it watches so you do not have to, and it talks to you when something actually needs your attention.