There's a small orange block attached to the side of every Gallagher wireless load bar. It's easy to miss, roughly the size of a thick paperback book, bolted to the end of the bar, with a single indicator light. But that orange module is the reason Gallagher's wireless load bars have no competitor in the UK market.
Inside that orange housing is a sealed lithium battery. Not a rechargeable battery. A primary lithium cell, the same chemistry used in industrial sensors, remote monitoring stations, and devices that have to run for years without human intervention. It's rated for ten years at three hours of weighing per week. The maths on that: if you weigh cattle for three hours every week for an entire decade, the battery still won't need replacing.
But here's the part most farmers don't fully appreciate until they've had the system running for a season: the battery isn't draining when you're not weighing. Gallagher's wireless bars are dormant by default. They're not transmitting. They're not broadcasting. They enter a deep sleep state and sit there, under your crush, drawing almost nothing. They only wake up , only activate and begin communicating, when you log into your Gallagher weigh head and start a session. The moment you close the session, they go back to sleep.
This is clever engineering solving a real problem. Battery-powered agricultural equipment typically fails at one of two points: the battery runs flat unexpectedly, or the farmer gets tired of charging it and the behaviour changes — the system gets used less, records become incomplete, the value of the data degrades.
Gallagher's solution is to eliminate both failure modes. The battery can't run flat unexpectedly because the bars aren't doing anything between sessions. And there's nothing to charge because it's a primary cell.
What This Means in Practice
These bars live under your crush. Permanently. You don't take them out when it rains. You don't bring them inside in winter. You don't move them to a dry shed between weighing sessions. They sit there, in the farmyard, in whatever weather the north of England throws at them, fully sealed, fully waterproof, fully protected.
When the lorry is booked and you need to weigh out your stores, you go to the yard, log into the TW-1, and the bars wake up. Your weigh head connects automatically. You start weighing.
If the crush moves to a different field, a new building, or a sale the bars go with it. They're fitted to the crush frame, not to the building. Your entire weighing system is as portable as your crush.
Why No One Else Makes Wireless Load Bars
This is the question that surprises most farmers when it comes up: if wireless load bars are this good, why doesn't every manufacturer make them? The short answer is that the engineering is genuinely difficult. Sealed primary cell power management for a sensor that has to deliver milligram-accurate weight readings is a different challenge from building a Bluetooth speaker or a phone. Getting the power consumption low enough to make a ten-year battery viable requires the kind of low-power electronics design that takes years to develop and validate.
Gallagher invested that development time. The result is the only wireless load bar in the UK and Irish market. No Tru-Test load bar. No AgriEID load bar. No own-brand load bar. If you want wireless, you buy Gallagher.
The Wired Alternative: and When It Makes Sense
Gallagher also makes wired load bars, and they are the right choice in some circumstances. If you have a fixed crush in a purpose-built handling shed with a permanent cable run already in place, wired bars work perfectly well and cost less upfront. If you're on a very tight budget and the FETF grant is covering the difference anyway, wired bars can be a sensible starting point.
But for anyone building a new system, moving to a new handling setup, or working with a mobile crush, wireless is the right choice. The premium pays for itself in the hassle it saves and the durability it adds over a working lifetime.
Ask us for a comparison quote — wired and wireless side by side with FETF funding applied. You may find the difference is smaller than you think.
In need of more information? Read our complete guide to gallagher weighing & EID systems for UK cattle farmers.