Measuring well water levels on the cheap with load cells

Published On: July 31 2026

Four brown cows and one white-faced cow stand around a concrete water trough in a grassy field, looking towards the camera. All cows have ear tags, and there’s a fence and more grass in the background. The water trough could be an ideal spot to measure well water usage or monitor consumption with load cells for precise tracking.

As more parts of the UK are officially declared in drought, water levels across the UK are falling to record low levels. For those homeowners, smallholders and livestock farmers who rely on well water, it’s particularly worrying if they cannot accurately monitor their well water levels.

In a remarkably simple solution designed for the Engineers Without Borders project, a custom load cell and a single battery can monitor well water levels for years with minimal build costs and maintenance. In the buoyancy-based design, everything in the well itself is water-safe, and the electronics sit outside above the surface. Data on levels is stored on a text file on an easily changed USB stick. (1)

Monitoring in remote areas

Designer Hans Gaensbauer needed to design a cheap, reliable monitor for a remote well in Nicaragua, using readily available parts such as 2.5″ PVC pipe, PTFE tubing, a 9V battery, and basic load cells.

“The load cell is set up as a bridge using four strain gauges bonded to the aluminum sensing element. Two of them are attached above the point where the load cell is supported, so they see no strain from the weight of the pipe, but they compensate for temperature drift in the two sensing elements. The load cell is held by a piece machined from a nylon bolt that is eventually glued into a length of PTFE tubing. The threads of the bolt protrude from the bottom of the PTFE tubing so that the load cell can be bolted to the well cap.” (2)

Find more details and circuitry diagrams here: (2)

Everyday Archimedes

A similar design at instructables.com is based on Archimedes’ Principle, and was originally created at the Delft University of Technology. Again, the sensor was made from everyday materials as:

“You want the cylinder as light as possible because when you make the object too heavy, the object will only start floating when the water is standing really high, or it won’t float at all. The net force that determines if the object is going to float, is equal to the buoyant force minus the force exerted by gravity. We chose a PVC pipe with a length of 0.75 m, diameter of 75 mm and wall thickness of 2.2 mm, since this was the easiest to get.” (3)

The electronics behind the monitoring was a Arduino Uno, which the team noted required taring for the load cell. :

“The load cell has to be tared in order to take accurate measurements. This must be done every time the Arduino is powered on or something on the circuit is changed whilst the Arduino is powered on. Taring can be done with the push button connected to pin 7.”

Waterproof load cells

Load cells are used by a whole range of industries that require them to work underwater or in wet conditions, from oil companies to bridge builders, fish farms to medical devices. Here are just some of our article on load cells for underwater, wet, or hostile envronments.

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Looking for load cells to solve an everyday challenge?

Contact us to discus your project and your ideas. We have help hundreds of clients design and set up custom-designed load cell solutions for a wide range of testing, measuring and weighing requirements. We can design custom load cells too to fit your brief, and we’re UK based too in Reading, Berks.