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Abstract
Water usage monitoring has been a long-trusted management tool for commercial poultry production. This research focused on determining alert thresholds and evaluating water usage
patterns in three cage-free layer houses. It was found that alert events could be detected with
hourly thresholds based on mean usage and standard deviation (SD), but a considerable number
of alerts (71%) did not have attributable causes and may be false alerts. To improve alert
accuracy the consistency of water usage patterns of the three laying houses was analyzed. It was
found that houses can have unique characteristics in their water usage and that the day-to-day
usage pattern was consistent. A moving hourly water usage alert system based on Statistical
Process Control detected events but still generated many unexplained alerts (74%). These
findings suggest there are advantages to using frequent water usage monitoring systems, but
more research is needed to establish adequate dynamic alert thresholds.