Narrandera Shire Council (NSW) is the first Australian council to go to central control for all their battery controllers. The council has a brand new Toro Sentinel Central Control system combined with Tempus Ag battery radio controllers installed.

Council Parks Manager Roger Evans initial discussions with Michael Lenehan, Toro’s Commercial Irrigation Sales Manager, were centered around Toro’s Sentinel Central Control System to run the irrigation of the major sports fields and parks.

As Roger also looks after the towns of Barellan and Grong Grong, 50 km away in distance, he also needed a solution to look after smaller garden areas, including Barellan and Grong Grong town cemeteries. With no 240v power available at these sites they were irrigated by using 8 stand-alone battery controllers.

Thanks to new Toro Tempus LoRa (Long Range) radio battery controllers Roger and his staff can now control the irrigation programming from their phone app or software in the office.

If there is a week of heavy rain Roger is able to turn off his Tempus battery controllers with the press of a button. Sending staff out to remote sites to turn off each battery controller individually and returning back to turn them all on is now a thing of the past. 

Twelve 4G Tempus Towers were installed in total in the council area. Some towers are connected to 240v power, In areas where no power is available towers have a 20 watt solar panel installed. The towers communicate to 60 LoRa Tempus battery radio controllers at different sites. The radio battery controllers have a radio distance of 800 metres, and communicate direct to the 4G Tempus Towers. Communications from the Tempus Towers to the Narrandera office is cloud based.

The Tempus system is the perfect solution for the shire’s irrigation control system as it can be run parallel to the Sentinel system.

Overall, Narrandera Council has set up twelve Sentinel master controllers at major sports fields and parks and is using the new Tempus Ag battery radio controllers for all other sites that were once stand-alone battery controllers.

In the next stage the council will start connecting their water meters into the system to measure their water usage.

Graeme Poole and the team at Watertek, Wagga Wagga were the irrigation dealer for this project.