A regional fuel distributor put SP Level sensors on sixty customer tanks. Refill routes are now planned from live fill levels instead of phone calls — and night-time level drops stopped being invisible.
A fuel distributor serving farms, fleets and boiler houses across two regions used to plan refills the way the industry has always planned them: by phone call and habit. Some customers called too late and ran dry; others were visited “just in case” with a nearly full tank. Every unnecessary trip is a tanker, a driver and a day.
The setup
Sixty customer tanks received an SP Level — a battery-powered LoRaWAN level sensor mounted on the tank top fitting. Rural sites are covered by SP Net gateways installed at the depots and at a handful of customer buildings; the rest ride existing public coverage. Battery life at a one-hour reporting interval is measured in years, which matters when the tank is a two-hour drive away.
Each sensor was provisioned with the tank’s geometry, so SP SmartCloud shows litres and per cent, not millimetres of ullage.
What changed
- Dispatchers plan routes from a live map of fill levels, sorted by days-to-empty.
- “Just in case” visits disappeared; tankers leave when a cluster of tanks actually needs them.
- Customers on critical processes get their own read-only dashboard and low-level alerts.
- Every delivery is verified: the level curve shows exactly how many litres arrived and when.
The part nobody advertised
Two months in, the platform flagged a tank whose level dropped repeatedly between midnight and four in the morning — in steps too regular to be consumption. The customer installed a lockable cap and a camera; the drops stopped. Nobody filed a report, but the sensor had quietly answered a question the customer had been afraid to ask out loud.
The distributor’s operations manager measures the project in trips: eleven fewer tanker runs in the first month, and not a single dry tank since the rollout.