Managing irrigation was a hassle for Tige Gardner.
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At all hours of the day and night, he'd dash across his farm at Katandra to open and close water gates. That was until he installed a WiSA irrigation system.
Mr Gardner runs close to 600 hectares, typically lucerne and teff hay over summer, and wheat, oats, barley or canola through winter. This year, just wheat and vetch.
Before automation, he'd be up two, three, sometimes four nights a week chasing water.
The alarm would go off, he'd throw some clothes on and drive out to turn a channel over, before getting back into bed just in time for the next alarm.
"You've lost half an hour and then get back into bed, and that might be all over again in another two hours' time," he said.
"You just get no sleep."
Twelve months on, that routine is largely gone.
Mr Gardner has spent about $200,000 converting 220 hectares of his irrigated country to an automated system built by WiSA Farm and Irrigation Automation.
The Echuca company’s AquaLink software lets him open and shut gates, start and stop pumps and monitor sump and channel levels from a computer, iPad or phone.
"There's not once that it's not opened or shut or started a pump," Mr Gardner said.
"It's one of those things we've put in and it just works."
That reliability is the system’s big drawcard, he said. He's tried other automation before, without success.
The stakes, he said, are too high for error. A gate that doesn't open when a channel is running full can mean water spilling down the road, or into the wrong bays overnight, causing damage that isn't cheap or quick to fix.
The system runs on a UHF radio link rather than mobile coverage, hooked to the internet only for the interface.
If power or internet drops out mid-cycle, it keeps executing whatever program was already running, while channel-height sensors alert him before a problem becomes a blowout.
Mr Gardner started putting in the new system last September, an initial 380 acres before adding another 150 this year.
At roughly $2350 per outlet, he plans to bring the rest of his irrigated area on board over the next couple of years.
Maintenance amounts to little more than replacing a small battery every seven years.
Some growers, he's been told, are still running 25-to-30-year-old installations, upgraded in stages rather than replaced.
The return is mostly measured in time. Where he'd previously lose up to four days a week ferrying between outlets, instead of needing to put another worker on, he now oversees watering from a tractor cab or ute while getting other jobs done.
He estimates the system has already saved about $70,000 in wages this year, and said the first phase will pay for itself within two years.
"Now I've got my time back," he said.
"I don't have to train anyone to do what I'm doing."
That extends to time off the farm altogether.
He can leave for a weekend, or take a longer break over summer, and still start, stop or override the irrigation remotely, a flexibility he says was unthinkable when watering meant being there around the clock.
He's not alone in vouching for the system.
A neighbour who has run WiSA for eight or nine years told Mr Gardner it "just works".
His Rabobank manager, who comes from a large dairy farming family herself, told him she's never had a client complain about the system, from years of lending against similar installations.
"Not one of them has said they’d never do it again," Mr Gardner said she told him.
"Every one of them said they'd only be adding to it."