A livery yard's stable cameras only record on motion, and the water troughs are on a meter because water is billed. Box 7 has been empty since March. Its camera records motion every night and its trough uses twenty litres, which is what a horse drinks.
I run a livery yard with twenty two boxes, and the cameras and the meters were my idea.
How the yard is monitored.
Every box has a camera that records when the picture changes, so a horse that is cast or colicking in the night trips it and I get an alert. The troughs are automatic, filled by a float valve off a main, and the main has a meter, and there is a sub meter on each row of boxes because I recharge water to the owners.
A horse drinks between twenty and forty litres a day depending on the weather, and the row meters agree with the horses on the row to within a bucket or two. A horse that stops drinking is a horse that is ill and I want to know.
Box 7 has been empty since March, when the mare in it was sold.
Its camera records motion every night between about one and four. The row meter shows about twenty litres a night that the other boxes on that row cannot account for, and box 7's trough, which I have watched go down, is where it goes.
The trough is a bowl with a float valve. It only fills when the level drops, and the level only drops when something takes water out.
What has been checked.
The camera. It records on motion, and what it records is the box. Straw on the floor, the trough, the door, the bars, in the infrared light the camera uses at night, and nothing moves in the picture while the camera says something did.
I have watched perhaps sixty of those clips. Straw, trough, door, bars.
The trough. A leaking float valve would explain the water and it was the first thing I replaced. The new valve does the same. So I turned the water off to box 7 at the isolator on the pipe, in July, and the trough went down over four nights, five litres at a time, until it was dry, and then the camera went on recording motion every night with the trough empty.
The box. Rats, a cat, a bird. The camera would show them and it shows nothing.
What the water meter says that the camera cannot.
The sub meter for that row reads every litre, and it has a pulse output that logs to a file with a time on it.
Twenty litres in box 7 does not go in one go. It goes in pulls of about a litre and a half, a few seconds apart, in three or four bouts over the night, with ten minutes between the bouts.
That is a horse drinking. That is exactly a horse drinking. You stand by a trough with a horse and it takes long swallows and lifts its head and comes back, and the meter has that written down in a box with no horse in it.
What is done about it.
Box 7 is not let. I have had two enquiries for it and I have said it is being used for storage, which it now is, because I put the muck fork and the wheelbarrow in it so the lie would be true.
The water is on the yard's account, not an owner's. Twenty litres a night is a few pounds a month.
I have told my vet, because she is somebody I can say things to. She asked whether the mare that was in it had been ill. She had not. She had been sold to a girl in the next county and she is fine and I have seen her at a show since.
What I do.
I do the night check at ten, every box, and box 7 is on the round.
The one change is that I do the night check with the yard lights on now, all of them, which costs money and which the owners have noticed and which I have blamed on the insurers.
The reason is the night check in August, at about ten past ten, before the lights went in, with the torch, when I got to box 7 and put the torch through the bars, which is the whole of a night check.
The straw was flat in the middle. Not scattered, not fresh. Flat and pressed in an oval about the size a horse makes when it has been lying down, and the edges of the oval were still lifting, slowly, the way straw does in the minute after a horse gets up.