CanalSense builds self-powering wireless sensor nodes that measure irrigation water and carry the readings out over long-range radio. We are based in Grand Junction, Colorado, and we build for the canals, ditches, and laterals of the Western United States.
Water you cannot measure is water you cannot manage. Across the West, most irrigation water is still delivered on estimates, paper records, and staff gauges read by hand once a day, and that gap costs districts real water through deliveries no one can verify and losses no one can locate. We are building the measurement layer for that system, so a district can account for what it moves and use less of it to do the same work.
In 1922, seven states signed the Colorado River Compact and divided the river between an Upper and a Lower Basin, promising each 7.5 million acre-feet a year. Those numbers were set during an unusually wet stretch of record, so the river was split up as though it carried more water than it reliably does. A century of growth and sustained drought later, the same river irrigates much of the West while its largest reservoirs sit near record lows.
That pressure lands on irrigation districts. They are being asked to prove what they deliver and to trim what they take, using infrastructure that was never instrumented for either. The open canals and laterals carrying water the last miles to the field are where the accounting breaks down, because putting a working instrument out there has always been too hard to power and too far to reach.
A CanalSense node sits directly in the flow. One rotor both powers the device and encodes the measurement, so there is no battery to service and no line to run. Readings travel over 433 MHz LoRa to a gateway at the district's operations point, then into a time-series database and a dashboard that staff open from the office. Because it powers itself and carries its own radio, a node goes in without the trenching, meter pit, or cellular contract a conventional gauge would need.
What a district gets is continuous data from infrastructure that has always run dark, in a form that holds up for delivery accounting, compliance, and grant reporting.
Every acre-foot in Colorado is counted and contested, and the state's technology base runs from aerospace to embedded systems. Building here keeps the water law, the districts, and the engineering all within reach. CanalSense works out of the Business Incubator Center in Grand Junction, in the middle of the Grand Valley's canal country, with test water minutes from the bench.
A long-range radio network for irrigation water data, covering canals, ditches, and laterals across the American West. Designed and built in Grand Junction, Colorado.