So I am thinking about installing a laundry machine in the kitchen due to lack of space in bathroom.
As a safety precaution I would like to set up a automatic stop of water/electricity supply to the laundry machine in case of a flood.
Is this something that is best bought off the shelves (pricey…?) or can it be built in a safe manner?
I have one of these. Cuts the main off if any of the sensors are tripped.
Floater switch - esp8266 - relais - electric valve
Mount floater switch on the bottom plate of your machine, if triggered switch off valve, send notification to HASS or Phone or whatever you want, alarm!!
costs well about $25 or so.
Here’s the thing, and it’s meant as no offence to any DIY solution; this is somewhere you don’t want to compromise.
I lost an entire house because of a water leak and I was lucky that I had moved most of my possessions out already and was living elsewhere and that I had premium insurance. $150 is not a lot of money to spend to avoid something like this:
That is the workers late into the night propping my house up so that it didn’t collapse into the street. And they only did that so that it wouldn’t fall over before they could level it the next day.
Ouch… that is not something I would like to go through =/ sorry to hear that.
I am living in an apartment building so the damage could be even worse.
I will contact the insurance company as well as the housing association to see exavtly what the rules say on installing a laundry machine in the kitchen.
The rules here in Sweden state that it is ok to install a laundry machine in any room that has a a drain (my kitchen does not) or if there is a active water valve stop.
Are you happy with the leaksmart? Have you tested it and is it easy to connect to Home Assistant?
I haven’t gotten a plumber in to install it yet, but I have friends who have them and are happy.
I will be running it through Wink, so I’ll be able to set up notifications and the like via Wink support in HA. Once I get it set up, I will probably buy an additional sensor pack.
Does the Leaksmart valve+sensor require the wink hub in order to work?
I would like to avoid having to buy a hub just for this one appliance.
Unfortunately, a hub of some sort is required. But you can use Wink, SmartThings, IRIS or LeakSmart’s own hub as part of a kit. You can get the Wink v1 for a song at this point and it will work great. But at the moment there is no direct API for access and I’m not sure if there is going to be one.
If you’re interested, I would talk to your Insurance Provider and see if they will offer you a discount if you put one in place.
ah ok and there are no add-ons to the raspberry pi I could get that would do the job?
Those hubs seem to be hard to get in europe.
Most of what I can see on Github related to LeakSmart seems to be for SmartThings. I’m not aware of anything else.
You can always order the LeakSmart hub as part of a kit though.
Looks bad, no no offence taken.
Only build things yourself if you feel comfortable with it, and yes you are right things can go bad, obviously!
Hope your house is restored!
No, they had to tear it down the next day. I ended up moving and recently sold the lot to my next door neighbor.
Could you share the story behind where the leak was and what happened? Very interested to hear why it required a tear-down.
We’re still not sure. It could have been a burst pipe on the second floor bathroom that followed the heating chaseway down to the basement and caused the slab to erode, which in turn caused the foundation to fail. Or it could have been a sinkhole in the basement that caused the house to shift, breaking the pipe and then the water did it’s damage on top of it.
The house was a mass of cracks on all sides and there were holes in the fieldstone foundation. The insurance investigator and township engineer had to leave in mid survey because the house was creaking and shifting while they were in it. I made it all the way to the the third floor but could only survey the house myself for about 15 minutes; it was literally in danger of collapsing any minute, hence the reason they temporarily braced it overnight.
A day or so later, it was just a pile of rubble.
I don’t have any photos of the inside, nor do I have the words to describe it. The whole thing was pretty traumatic. I had just lost both parents to cancer (Mom first, then dad some months after) and had been living at their house to care for them. I have a sibling that lived only 10 minutes away, but she hadn’t spoken to the family in years and didn’t even come to the funerals. After my Father died, she broke into my parent’s house and stole the will and changed the locks.
I had gone through a horrendous estate battle and finally just decided to settle since money was the only thing she was interested in anyway. I signed the settlement papers on New Year’s Eve day. This all happened about three weeks later.
That’s pretty much all I care to say about it.
I’m trying to decide whether to install the leaksmart device, or shell out for the more expensive Fortrez device. I like the Fortrezz because it also has a manual shutoff, and the place I need to install this doesn’t have alot of space so combining these into one could be cheaper overall.
This device is $425:
https://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Z-Wave-Water-Valve-Cert/dp/B006KU9ECE
Just as an FYI, the LeakSmart has buttons on the front to open and close and batteries as a backup for when the power goes out.
I finally got a handyman to come in and install it; turns out he knows electrical as well as he does plumbing and wired an outlet next to the panel so I was also able to finally install my Aeotec Home Energy Monitor as well.
Thanks for the heads of, I didn’t realise it had a battery backup. Maybe I could just stick this inline with the existing shut-off valve and be done with it.
Have to figure out how to get power to that spot. There are outlets on the other side of the wall so hoping to just punch through to those.
I wonder why the Fortrezz one is so much more expensive than the leaksmart. Looks like Leaksmart is ZigBee, which could me annoying as I would need to install some repeaters to cover the distance
I love this solution if you have a regular shut off ball valve
Z-Wave Plus Gas / Water Auto Valve:
Z-Wave Water Leakage Sensor Alarm Detector
No plumbing work needed.
If you go for this type of solution you also don’t need to think about bad gaskets as you need to think about when using magnetic valves