Construction Monitoring & Sediment Control

Stay Within Your Limits, Protect Waterways, Prove Compliance.

Construction and earthworks sites carry a high risk of sediment runoff and water quality breaches, especially during rainfall and dewatering. Whatever your discharge is permitted under, site teams face growing scrutiny from regulators, clients and the community, and the burden of proving they stayed within their limits.

AquaWatch makes that easier, with continuous monitoring that does not depend on manual sampling or delayed lab results. What your regulator requires depends on where you work, and we cover the main markets below.

Built for High-Risk Sites, and Regulatory Scrutiny.

What you have to monitor, and how you prove it, depends on where you work. The answers below cover New Zealand, Australia, the UK, and Ireland and the EU.

Civil Contractors & Developers

For site managers, compliance leads, and environmental advisors: Monitor turbidity and site runoff in real time, automate reporting, and respond faster during weather events.

Council & Regulatory Partners

For stormwater officers and compliance teams: Access site-specific discharge data and response logs to support investigations and ensure enforcement.

Environmental Consultants

For advisors and consent specialists: Deploy modular sensor networks and AI-enabled cameras to monitor construction impacts and track sediment control performance.

Capture: Real-Time Site Monitoring

AquaWatch combines compact sensors with AI-enabled cameras to deliver continuous turbidity, conductivity, and flow monitoring at key discharge points, before, during, and after earthworks activity.

This provides early warning of sediment exceedances, and eliminates the delays and uncertainty of traditional sampling.

Understand: See the Site in Context

SWIM-OS places live readings into operational and regulatory context. Overlay data with site boundaries, rainfall, and consent conditions to:

Track compliance against sediment discharge thresholds
Identify site-specific risks and triggers
Provide council officers with audit-ready evidence

Act: Respond Early, Stay Compliant

Smart alerts notify site teams when turbidity thresholds are exceeded, enabling immediate action, from reapplying controls to pausing works.

All events, readings, and interventions are logged and time-stamped, creating a verifiable audit trail for council review or internal QA.

Improve: Demonstrate Performance Over Time

Use AquaWatch to show regulators and clients that your controls are working. Our platform supports:

Daily logs and automated compliance reporting
Pre- and post-rainfall comparisons
Long-term trend analysis for complex or multi-phase projects

AquaWatch turns real-time monitoring into operational insight, and sediment management into a performance story.

The Devices

The AquaWatch monitoring range covers a floating sensor, a connected monitoring unit, and a camera, used individually or together depending on the site.

What is the WaQA Float?

The WaQA Float is a floating, battery-powered array of sensors that sits in a sediment pond or watercourse and measures water quality continuously, including turbidity. It is designed to deploy without civil works, which means it can be placed and switched on rather than built into a structure.

What is the WaQA Link?

The WaQA Link is the connected element of the range that brings monitoring data back from the field to the platform in real time, it's battery powered, designed for ease of deployment, and anti theft.

What is the WaQA Camera?

The WaQA Camera adds visual monitoring alongside the water quality sensors, giving a view of site and water conditions to sit next to the readings. Used with the Float it provides visual context that helps tell a genuine event apart from an artefact, for example confirming whether a turbidity spike reflects a real change or something transient passing the sensor.

How quickly can a device be deployed?

A device can be deployed quickly because it does not require permanent infrastructure. Where an auto-sampler needs a weir and an outlet built in timber and concrete before it can run, an AquaWatch device attaches and powers on. This is not only a convenience. Monitoring that needs civil works only ever goes on a few ponds, while monitoring that deploys quickly can be placed across many points, which is what turns scattered readings into a picture of the whole site.

How does alerting work, and how do you avoid false alarms?

Alerting works by setting threshold values against the continuous signal and notifying the site when a reading crosses them. The familiar failure of older systems is the false alarm, where a fish, debris, or a brief disturbance spikes a reading and fires an alert, until the site stops trusting the alerts altogether. The way to manage this is to alert on sustained exceedance rather than on instantaneous spikes, so a reading has to stay over the threshold for a set period before an alarm is raised. Where a camera is paired with the sensor, it adds visual confirmation of what was actually happening.

How the service is delivered (Data as a Service)

What is Data as a Service, and how does the AquaWatch model work?

AquaWatch is delivered as a service rather than a hardware sale. Instead of buying sensors and taking on their installation, maintenance and calibration yourself, you subscribe to the monitoring outcome, and AquaWatch deploys the devices, keeps them running, and delivers the data, alerts and compliance evidence for the life of the project. This is what Data as a Service means here. You are paying for continuous, defensible evidence delivered to you, not for a box you then have to look after.

What is included in a subscription?

A subscription covers the monitoring devices, their connectivity, access to the monitoring platform, real-time data and alerting, and the reporting and evidence outputs, along with the maintenance and calibration that keep the data reliable.

What does it cost?

Pricing is a subscription scaled to the number of monitoring points, the parameters you need, the reporting you want, and the length of the project. It is designed to sit within an environmental compliance budget rather than as a capital purchase. For numbers against a specific job, we provide indicative pricing on request, which you can compare against how you monitor today.

Who uses AquaWatch on construction projects?

AquaWatch runs on live construction and infrastructure projects under genuine regulatory scrutiny. These include in-stream monitoring with Fulton Hogan and HEB, both tier-one civil contractors, on major roading and rail works, HEB being a Vinci company. AquaWatch also delivers monitoring on RiverLink, the regional infrastructure programme run with Greater Wellington Regional Council, and on Auckland Council's multi-catchment monitoring programme, among the largest of its kind in New Zealand.

How do I get indicative pricing?

Tell us the shape of the job, the number of monitoring points, and what you need to report, and we will provide indicative pricing you can put against your current approach. Get in touch for indicative pricing.

Case Studies

How do I monitor water quality discharges and sediment ponds on a construction site?

You monitor by placing in-situ sensors at the points that matter, the outlet of a sediment pond and the receiving water upstream and downstream of any in-stream works, and reading them continuously rather than by collecting samples by hand. The sensor measures turbidity in real time, the data goes to a monitoring platform, thresholds raise an alert when a reading crosses a limit, and the continuous record is kept as evidence of how the site performed. This replaces, or sits alongside, manual grab sampling and pond-outlet auto-samplers, both of which give you a single point in time and a wait for laboratory results. What the regulator actually requires of you depends on where you are working, which the questions below cover.

How do I monitor sediment basins on an Australian construction site?

Australia has no single national rule, and the requirement depends on the state. New South Wales works under the Protection of the Environment Operations Act, with the EPA as regulator and the Managing Urban Stormwater guidance, the Blue Book, as the reference for erosion and sediment control. Queensland works to the IECA Best Practice guidance and has been more active in high-efficiency sediment basins, which are more likely to warrant continuous monitoring than a standard settle-and-release basin. Other states differ again.

How do I monitor sediment pond discharge on a UK construction site?

In England and Wales the regulator is the Environment Agency, and discharging water from a construction site to a watercourse generally requires a bespoke environmental permit under the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2016. Suspended solids is normally the compliance parameter, with limits set case by case, commonly in the range of tens of milligrams per litre, and once a limit is set on the permit it is the permit holder's duty to stay within it through a monitoring plan. Short-term dewatering of clean rainwater or groundwater can sometimes run under an exemption for a limited period. Continuous turbidity monitoring, converted to suspended solids through a site correlation, gives you the live picture during an event and the record the permit's monitoring plan calls for. Scotland and Northern Ireland are regulated differently, by SEPA and the NIEA respectively, so the permitting route there is not identical.

How do I monitor construction sites in Ireland and the wider EU?

Across Ireland and the EU, surface water protection sits under the Water Framework Directive, with requirements set and enforced nationally and locally, by the EPA in Ireland. The monitoring approach is the same, but the specific obligations vary by authority and by site.

How do I monitor sediment ponds on a New Zealand construction site?

In New Zealand monitoring obligations come from the conditions of your resource consent under the Resource Management Act, enforced by the regional council. Erosion and sediment control design and monitoring usually follow the NZTA Erosion and Sediment Control Guideline and the relevant regional guidance, such as Auckland Council's guideline document. Consents vary widely in how prescriptive they are, from requiring one monitored pond per catchment to requiring monitoring on every device, and that variation drives the cost. Where a consent sets a total suspended solids limit, you measure turbidity continuously and convert it using a correlation built on site, because the NZTA guideline itself notes there is no fixed relationship between turbidity and suspended solids and that it has to be established for each location.

Does AquaWatch meet regulatory and compliance standards?

AquaWatch operates to recognised quality and information management standards and the monitoring service is designed to meet the regulatory requirements that apply to the consent or permit it supports.