I've been hooked on water since I was a kid splitting time between Texas and Florida. In Florida I watched red tide turn whole stretches of coast toxic while everyone kind of shrugged — because monitoring it properly was expensive and nobody really owned the problem. That stuck with me. Years later I wrote my college thesis on water quality trading, which most people found impossibly niche and I found fascinating.
Eventually I got frustrated enough to build the thing I kept wishing existed: a monitor made for remote sites where you can't just walk out and grab a sample every day. Ponds, wells, cisterns, stormwater — places that currently either get checked by hand or need a $5k+ industrial rig nobody's going to put on a farm pond.
Six channels — pH, TDS, turbidity, ORP, temp, GPS — with long-range radio (~15km) so it reports back from places with no wifi, and local buffering so it doesn't lose data when the connection drops. There are other monitors out there and I'm not claiming I invented water sensing. But three things almost none of them do, so I built around them:
- It can act, not just watch. There's a relay on board, so it can trip a pump, kick on a doser, or close a valve on its own. Closed loop, not just a logger.
- It's fully programmable. You're not stuck with my six sensors — you can wire in an arbitrary probe and write the logic for it. Any parameter you can read, not a fixed menu.
- It has compute on board. It can run analysis on-site — catch a sensor drifting or a reading going out of range and respond locally, without waiting on a cloud round-trip.
Right now I'm putting units on friends' and family's places and a handful of properties around Texas to find the real-world failure modes before I trust it anywhere that matters.
Two things I'd genuinely value this sub's read on:
- Am I reinventing a wheel? I found partial overlaps but nothing doing closed-loop control + full programmability + on-site compute together. If something already nails all three, I'd rather know now.
- If you had a programmable monitor with a relay and local compute sitting on a water body you care about — what would you actually want it watching, or doing? Curious what this crowd would deploy it on that I haven't thought of.
One more thing — if you're anywhere on the Gulf, US side or the Mexican coast, I'd really like to hear from you. Red tide, algae blooms, well contamination, whatever you actually deal with — DM me. I especially want to know if your community has ever looked at or tried water quality trading, because I think the Gulf is exactly where this should be happening and I want to understand what's real on the ground versus what I've only read about.
