Water supply monitoring and automated salinity control for an 18-hole golf course on the South Coast of New South Wales — eliminating manual pump rounds and overnight callouts entirely.
Background
A well-established 18-hole coastal golf course manages its own water supply independently of the town mains — drawing from a network of bore pumps, holding reservoirs, and a pump distribution system that feeds irrigation across fairways, greens, and rough.
The course sits near a tidal estuary, which creates an ongoing salinity management challenge. Bore water quality shifts seasonally, but the more acute risk comes during king tides — when seawater pushes inland and can infiltrate the lower storage reservoirs. When reservoir salinity climbed too high, the water became harmful to turf and the irrigation system had to be switched immediately to bore supply. Previously, this meant an alarm waking the greenskeeper at any hour of the day or night and requiring them to come on-site to manually shut down the reservoir pump, change over the valve, and bring a bore pump online. There was no way to anticipate the event, and no way to respond without being physically present.
With pump stations and reservoirs spread across a large property, daily checks required physical site visits — typically 45–60 minutes of grounds staff time each morning before any turf work could begin.
The Challenge
The Solution
Seven Fieldmouse devices were installed across all four bore pump stations, both distribution pump stations, and the three main storage reservoirs. The deployment covered:
The Outcome
Grounds staff check the dashboard on arrival rather than walking pump stations. Site visits now happen on exception only, freeing the team for turf work from the start of each day.
Monthly extraction totals per bore are pulled directly from the platform, replacing the paper log system and reducing end-of-year reconciliation from a day's work to under an hour.
Continuous run alerts have been triggered four times since installation — each time catching a fault condition before damage occurred. The prior burnout rate of roughly one per season has not recurred.
Automated switchovers now respond to threshold breaches within seconds, before harmful water can enter the distribution network. What previously required a human on-site is now handled in the background.
Salinity switchovers that previously required an on-call response at any hour now happen automatically. The greenskeeper wakes to a notification rather than an alarm, with the system already having resolved the situation.
The grounds manager receives a notification within minutes of any pump or valve state change. A full event log is available on the platform by morning, with timestamps for every action the system took.
Whether you're managing a single pump station or a distributed network of bores and reservoirs, Fieldmouse can be configured to your site. Get in touch to discuss your setup.
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