Smart Water Tank Monitoring System using IoT

Abstract

Water is a scarce and vital natural resource, and its inefficient management at the household, institutional, and industrial level leads to significant wastage through tank overflow, dry running of motor pumps, and lack of real-time visibility into consumption patterns. Conventional water tank monitoring relies on manual inspection or simple float-based mechanical indicators, both of which are labour-intensive, error-prone, and incapable of providing remote visibility. This paper presents the design and implementation of a Smart Water Tank Monitoring System that uses an ultrasonic distance sensor (HC-SR04) interfaced with a Wi-Fi enabled microcontroller (NodeMCU ESP8266) to continuously measure the water level inside a storage tank and transmit the data to a cloud-based IoT platform in real time. The system automatically triggers a submersible motor pump through a relay module when the water level falls below a configurable threshold, and switches it off once the tank is full, thereby eliminating overflow and dry-run conditions without human intervention. Users can monitor the live water level, receive low-level and full-tank notifications, and view historical trends through a mobile application or web dashboard. A prototype of the proposed system was simulated and evaluated against manual monitoring and traditional float-switch based systems. The results indicate that the proposed IoT-based system achieves considerably higher control accuracy and a much shorter average response time than the existing alternatives, while also reducing water wastage and manual effort. The paper concludes with a discussion of the limitations of the current prototype and outlines directions for future work, including multi-tank scalability, solar-powered operation, and machine-learning-based consumption forecasting.