One of my more useful & simple automations is a dog water bowl sensor. It uses an Aqara Water Leak Sensor to monitor when the water dips below a certain level. Then I use Node-RED to get a text and a pushbullet to refill. Keeps our dogs hydrated, especially in this hot summer. Huge points on the WAF scale.
Details: All made for easy disasembly & cleaning. Single core wire extensions to the Aqara allen screw posts. Velcro’d the sensor to a sturdy plastic clip. Twisted the wires through the middle and through tight holes in the orange clamp jaw. Node-RED monitor of the trigger state. When Dry construct a message out to text and pushbullet with email optional. Easy Peasy
Still running on the original battery. Two dogs in our house now, and a third for a few weeks while my son is away. The sensor triggers reliably about 5 times a day. A very useful automation!
Nice I’m curious. How long do you think you can make those cables? I want to use the same mod for our water tank but configure it the other way around. Notify me if the sensor does NOT detect water so I know the water is below a certain level. I could put the sensor in a waterproof housing and have the cables submerged until the water is at low level.
I have my Aqara leak sensor attached to a regular extension cord that’s about 4ft long. It goes into my sump tank for ground water in my house. It allows me easy access to the sensor without it being in a tight spot.
It’s really just a switch that the sensor wakes up from when it changes.
Super simple flow - I monitor the Aqara leak sensor for state change. It returns “on” (wet), “off” (dry), or “unavailable”. If wet, nothing happens. If dry or unavailable, I run it through a function node to construct a message.
var payload = msg.payload
if (payload == ‘off’) {
msg.payload = ‘The dog water bowl is empty’
msg.payload = msg.payload + " at " + new Date().toString();
return msg
} else if (payload == ‘unavailable’) {
msg.payload = ‘The Dog Water Bowl Empty Sensor state is unavailable-ish’
msg.payload = msg.payload + " at " + new Date().toString();
return msg
}
That gets sent to my Pushover. I have an input boolean set up in my GUI so I can turn monitoring off. I also have a message rate limiter set up to only send 1 message per hour.
It’s still one of our more useful automations. Still running all these years later. I can’t remember replacing the battery, but may have at most once. I’ve upgraded the extension wires to solid wire. Great ROI!
I don’t think they even know it’s there. We have three dogs right now, but they are all older rescues so we haven’t had to deal with puppy energy - perhaps that’s why.
Pushover (https://pushover.net/) is a notification service that you can use programmatically to send messages to your devices or email. Highly recommended, and the Pro version is $5 one-time purchase. Once SMS stopped working programmatically a lot of Home Assistant folks switched to it. This water bowl sensor is still working today, 4-1/2 years later!
I built a notification to let me know if my cats are eating mixing ESPresence And the tin foil and paper pressure pads that touch feature on ESP32. I’ve… I wholly believe in using smart home on your pets. One of the best use cases, but out of curiosity. What do you do about the metals? Are you using 316 stainless steel?
copper wire in water will leach copper ions through electrolytic corrosion, which can cause copper toxicosis in dogs and cats over time.
That was the only thing that held me back from doing this like five years ago, but I think it might have been this post that I saw, but I didn’t know about the 316 stainless steel,
I’m curious. How long do you think you can make those cables? I want to use the same mod for our water tank but configure it the other way around. Notify me if the sensor does NOT detect water so I know the water is below a certain level. I could put the sensor in a waterproof housing and have the cables submerged until the water is at low level.