How to make a waterpump smart

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This project was born out of necessity; in my cellar I have two drainage hols with a pump to prevent my cellar gets wet. This installation was installed in 2001. Last winter the pumps needed to get back in action after some time of inactivity but the vertical pump floats appeared to be a bit sticky and their operating became unreliable.

I deactivated these floats (just turning them upside down) and replaced it with the combi:

  • Smart Switch; any smart switch will do provided they work with HA and have a reliable connection
  • Water Leak Sensor; again more choices here, any water leak or door sensors will do the trick.
  • 1 automation

After implementing this project the pumps can mange (if desired) a longer on/off level than a standard pump float.

For the sensor I am using a Zigbee Waterleak Sensor (TS0207 / _TZ3000_upgcbody). This sensor works in Z2M flawlessly and based upon the pump activity over the last 4 months this was around 86,000 times (the battery is still on 100%, but to be honest not sure if I ever changed these, anyone same experience with this sensor?)

I did replace the small sensor with an “eurostekker” (preferred a waterproof one) because this original sensor can suffer from capillary working between the two small polls (if also the plastic get wet).

image

We only need 1 automation to turn it on, off or spot for errors:

  • On: just when it gets wet
  • Off: based upon experience turn switch off after x seconds
  • error: should handle unavailable sensor due to low battery or always wet (I really like the “not_to” option).
alias: Drainage Pump Trap
description: "on/off/error actions "
trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id:
      - binary_sensor.drainage_pomp_trap_water_leak
    for:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 0
    id: go2on
    to: "on"
  - platform: state
    entity_id:
      - switch.smart_plug_drainage_pomp_trap
    for:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 7
    id: go2off
    to: "on"
  - platform: state
    entity_id:
      - binary_sensor.drainage_pomp_trap_water_leak
    not_to: "off"
    for:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 15
    id: error
condition: []
action:
  - choose:
      - conditions:
          - condition: trigger
            id:
              - go2on
        sequence:
          - service: switch.turn_on
            metadata: {}
            data: {}
            target:
              entity_id:
                - switch.smart_plug_drainage_pomp_trap
      - conditions:
          - condition: trigger
            id:
              - go2off
        sequence:
          - service: switch.turn_off
            target:
              entity_id: switch.smart_plug_drainage_pomp_trap
            data: {}
      - conditions:
          - condition: trigger
            id:
              - error
        sequence:
          - service: notify.notify_mail
            data:
              message: Is the sensor of Drainage Pump Trap still working?
              title: Pump (Trap) inactivity?
            enabled: true
mode: single

Also created a historical stats sensor which calculate the “running” hourly total . This give a better result than total activity each hour (at least in this situation).

ERRETA: viewing the HA logs I noticed my original line with (“now().replace(hour=now().hour-1)”) was creating too much lines due to error:

  File "/usr/src/homeassistant/homeassistant/helpers/template.py", line 588, in async_render
    raise TemplateError(err) from err
homeassistant.exceptions.TemplateError: ValueError: hour must be in 0..23

Replaced it with the new line (“now() - timedelta(hours=1)”")

- platform: history_stats
  name: Drainage Pomp Trap Frequency
  unique_id: 20240428_001
  entity_id: binary_sensor.drainage_pomp_trap_water_leak
  state: "on"
  type: count
  start: "{{now() - timedelta(hours=1)}}"
  end: "{{ now() }}"

Giving the following result:

image
image3319×799 199 KB

That’s all, hope you like it