So I saw a few posts about controlling aquarium lights with HA and I was curious if anyone else has taken HA to the next level with their Aquariums. Either way, I thought I’d share a little project of mine - perhaps it could be inspiring to others.
My Integration is a little insane, but that’s because my aquarium setup is also a little insane.
It’s a multi-tank marine aquarium setup, with a common water supply between all the aquariums totalling out around 2000 litres in water volume.
In the living and dining rooms, there are two good sized aquariums and there are even more aquariums in the back “fish room” where all the filters, pumps, etc are contained (a small dis-used closet I took over about 10 years ago).
Only a few months ago, I discovered HA and started testing it out on the house. A couple of weeks later, the wife and I were sold on HA and we dove in with both feet. Somewhere along the way, I remembered that I was very unhappy with my current monitoring tools for my aquarium & decided to do something about that with HA. About 2 weeks ago, I realised I had a spare RaspberryPi (first Gen version) that wasn’t doing anything anymore, and decided to make a remote “controller” that would integrate into HA.
I added almost half a dozen float sensors and 3 Temp sensors (have 6 more that just arrived I will be adding soon) and banged out some quick python code to monitor the probes/sensors with & feed back data to HA over MQTT.
About 10 days into the project, I was originally just going to add small OLED monochrome display for local feedback, but stumbled across some acrylic tubes and a NeoPixel LED bar I had in a box & came up with a more colourful “status” display using color patterns.
Yesterday, I installed it and it went “Live” and started gathering temp data for me right away.
And today, I finally managed to extend the float sensor cables & brought those online.
But the real value is in the control and oversight this now gives that I didn’t have in such a nice and accessible presentation before. I did have it, but not like this - and more importantly, not in a way that made sense to my wife. As you can see from my control panel below, I’m setting things up - for the first time in 20 years with this hobby (aquariums) - that my wife will finally be able to do water changes herself. Other tasks, like automatically emptying about 15 litres of protein skimmer waste just became 100% automatic today.
Anyways… if you’ve got an even crazier Aquarium setup that’s managed by HA - I’d love to see what you’ve got. If you’d like to know more, need ideas or need help with bringing your own Aquarium into the HA fold…I’d be happy to see what help I could lend. In the meantime, I’ll be hammering away at my own solution, working to improve it more. On the bucket list:
1.) Ph Meter
2.) Other water quality metrics (ORP, NH4, NO2, etc.)
3.) Fleshing out and thorough testing of ‘Fail safe’ logic - including the ability to detect over-flow conditions and shutdown safely.
4.) Greater and more intelligent integration between my aquarium heaters and central heat of our house (in the past, they’ve fought it out before & we paid the electric bill/gas for that - HA helped in uncovering that mystery
even.)
5.) scheduled automatic water changes
6.) Flow rate monitoring and control.
7.) Hook up another RaspberryPi currently in use as a media centre (Kodi) and use it to relay water level and temp readings from the remote tanks in living / dining rooms. Not that I expect this to be different when the system is running, but extremely useful to know if I shut down the central pumps for maintenance. Good to know if a tank starts to get too cold.
Happy Home and Fish Automation. 
