Farm irrigation and pump control
Inland farm: a remote pump set, irrigation valve groups and perimeter lighting spread beyond reliable Wi-Fi.
Background
Anonymised disclosure
This record is a documentation template for the skeleton site. It shows the intended structure of an irrigation case; it does not describe a delivered project.
No farm operator has been approached for disclosure, so no site, owner or date is named and all figures are illustrative.
Documentation template — no measured point count. Scale shown is illustrative only.
Constraints
- Distances between the pump set, the valve groups and the control room exceeded what a single conventional control cable run would suit.
- Power and surge conditions at the pump set had to be reviewed before any switching model could be fixed.
- Dry-contact inputs were wanted so an existing float or pressure switch could still trigger irrigation.
- Scheduling had to keep running when the farm uplink was down, which places the rule set on the local gateway.
- Enclosure and ingress protection had to be decided for an outdoor equipment environment.
How it was deployed
- Relay controllers sit near the pump set and the valve groups and link over a private LoRa network.
- A gateway in the equipment room holds the irrigation schedule and the dry-contact rules on premises.
- Pump and valve states are reported through the gateway; an optional cloud layer would only mirror management data.
What changed
Illustrative only. This figure is not a guarantee and must not be extrapolated to other farms.
Manual trips to open and close valve groups
- Before
- Illustrative baseline: routine manual trips during irrigation cycles.
- After
- Illustrative outcome: scheduled cycles ran without those trips.
Illustrative only. This figure is not a guarantee and must not be extrapolated to other farms.
Visibility of pump and valve state
- Before
- Illustrative: state known only by inspecting in person.
- After
- Illustrative: state reported through the gateway.
Illustrative only. Reporting depends on gateway uptime, radio coverage and the installed firmware revision.
Evidence
- Written client consent naming the project and defining the disclosure scope.
- A site survey covering distance, terrain and radio coverage.
- Gateway logs of irrigation schedules, dry-contact events and uptime.
- A commissioning report and, where any saving is claimed, metered readings.
- None of these documents are attached to this record yet.
What to validate for your site
- The record cannot report measured water, energy or labour savings, and none should be inferred from it.
- It cannot state coverage or link reliability over real field distances.
- It cannot confirm that the constraints above apply to any other farm.
- It cannot be presented as a client reference, because no disclosure has been approved.