Remote Monitoring for Water Districts

Monitoring sized for a small system

A rural water district carries the same responsibility as a big utility — keep the storage where it needs to be, know when something’s wrong, and have the records to show it — usually with a fraction of the staff and budget. And small is the norm, not the exception: about 91% of the nearly 50,000 community water systems in the U.S. serve 10,000 people or fewer, and the EPA notes these systems run lean, against aging infrastructure, operator turnover, and tight budgets. Driving the service area to read tanks, or finding out about a high or low level only when a customer calls, doesn’t scale, and a full SCADA build is more cost and wiring than many small systems can justify.

Meterra fills the gap. Wireless, non-contact sensors report your tank and reservoir levels to a phone or computer, alarm you the moment a level runs out of range — including after hours — and keep an exportable history, all without trenching, field power, or a control-system project.

What districts watch

• Storage and supply tanks — live level, percentage, and volume on every tank, with high- and low-level alarms. See water tank monitoring.
• Reservoirs and dams — remote level on open water, with a trend you can plan around.
• Wells and pump-fed tanks — pair level with pumping to avoid running a source dry or overflowing a tank.
• Stock and range water — districts managing grazing land can put the same sensors on remote stock tanks and troughs.

Non-contact, by design

Meterra senses the surface from above — the unit mounts over the tank and measures the distance to the water, so nothing sits in the stored supply. For a potable system that removes a category of worry: there’s no submerged probe to foul, corrode, or maintain inside the tank. The sensing is simply a level reading taken without contact. (It doesn’t replace your required testing or certifications — it gives you the level data, alarms, and records to run the system.)

Lighter and cheaper than SCADA

You don’t have to choose between flying blind and a six-figure control system. Meterra is the middle path: battery or solar sensors that report over Verizon NB-IoT cellular with no field wiring, install in about 15 minutes, and run 3+ years on a charge. You get live levels, configurable alarms, history charts, and CSV export for your records — as a standalone solution for a small system, or as an affordable supplement that puts eyes on the outlying tanks SCADA never reached.

Case study — Huntsville Town, Utah

Huntsville, a small town in northern Utah, stores its water in a million-gallon tank about a mile up a steep hill — remote, hard to reach, and monitored by an ultrasonic sensor wired directly into the town’s SCADA system. When that buried line was cut, the town lost its reading on the tank, and the quote to trench and replace the wire up that grade came in at $50,000 to $80,000.

Instead, Huntsville put a Meterra remote ultrasonic sensor on the tank. It reports the same numbers the wired sensor did — current depth, gallons, gallons to fill, depth to fill, and tank-level percentage — but wirelessly over cellular, with no line to cut and no trench to dig. The town got its million-gallon tank back on screen for a fraction of the cost of the wire it would have replaced.

Read the full Huntsville case study →

Records and alarms that hold up

Water you can’t see is water you can’t account for. Nationally, utilities lose nearly one in five gallons of treated water — about 19.5%, more than $6.4 billion a year by industry water-loss audits — before it ever reaches a meter, and you can’t fix a loss you can’t see. Level trends across your storage are often the first place an overflow, a stuck inlet, or a faster-than-normal drawdown shows up.

Every reading is stored and chartable, and every sensor’s history exports to CSV over any period, so your operating logs are backed by data rather than a clipboard. Alarms reach the right person when a level runs high or low — at 2 a.m. as readily as at 2 p.m. — so a problem gets a response while it’s still small.

Getting started

Most districts start by putting one sensor on the tank or reservoir that’s hardest to keep eyes on, prove it out, and expand across the system. Tell us your sites and the coverage there, and we’ll map the right setup and a pilot.