Examples of Pump Controller settings:
Phillip
I originally had one of their tank level measuring devices. Then it stopped working. At the same time i became interested in HA and what microcontrollers can do.
My investigation of the Smart Water system showed a failure of connection in wiring in the completely sealed housing.(it wasn’t completley sealed once I broke it apart to investigate) One of the wires had somehow got corrosion inside and then broke.
In my discussion with them about this and any replacement I mentioned I was going the HA route and could i integrate their wireless transponding data into HA. Short answer - NO. Not sure if you despise ‘smart’ apps like me but I don’t wnat to have 30 different ‘smart’ apps on my phone and have to scroll through them
So I tried a few differrent things and I am very happy with the current setup of a gravity throw in and a shelly uni.
Hi Patraff,
Thanks for the feed back.
Like you I am not a fan of needing multitudes of smart apps on my 'phone. I have four (Control4 (Automation) , Smartwater (tank level and pump control), SkyCommand (alarm) and smart.live (Solar PV) With those 4 apps, I can manage the necessary infrastructure of the house from anywhere that the internet is available. We need provide our own drinking water, effluent treatment and power.
My brother, who is a farmer in Australia, manages several adjoining farms. I think he has about 20 remote tanks on his network. He has been using SmartWatwe products for over ten years., and is generally happy with their performance. His only complaint is that the internal batteries in the tank senders can’t be replace. However, it is possible to use an external power supply (solar panel and battery), which can be connected to the power in socket on the tank sender.
I do have tank sender installed in the top of the effluent treatment tank, it is a pretty harsh environment and so far I have no leaks or corrosion issue.
Again thank for the feedback.
Philip
So I have all working now, but I am still getting fluctuations, and I am now wondering if this is due to the ambient pressure differences.
I have added a local barro to my weather station, and wondering if I can use this to offset the pressure changes in HA.
Looking at your graph your fluctuations are within 2%???
I could live with that
Yea true, but sometimes they are like 7% fluctuations.
Just depends on the temperatures etc.
Looks to be clear that it is temperature. Maybe try and shade your gizmo box. Mine is under cover.
I have had great success with the Yolink water depth sensor for two large irrigation tanks. Smart Water Solutions – YoLink
I tried two different ultrasound units before finding Yolink. They both had problems from being outside in the elements and had problems with accuracy.
Just adding to the feedback on what works; I installed a pressure sensor (one from Aliexpress, fairly hefty stainless steel probe with a cable incorporating a reference tube) into a rainwater tank, reading with an ESP32-C3 using the ADC.
The tank is about 2m deep, the sensor is 4-20mA rated for 3m depth, so I used a 180ohm load resistor and a 10K/4.7uF LC filter to the GPIO pin, plus a 20 sample sliding window averaging filter in the yaml. The sensor is powered from 12V, the C3 board has a switching regulator dropping the same 12V to 3.3V.
The results are excellent, below is a graph from HA showing reported tank level vs rain rate. My calculated values for converting ADC voltage to % were almost spot on - it’s going to 100% with rain then dropping to 99 so I have since tweaked the multiplier slightly. I previously checked that it read 0% with the sensor out of the water.
I also have an analog threshold binary sensor with hysteresis to control a valve that will refill this tank from a larger one using gravity feed so it gets topped up when usage exceeds rainfall.
sensor:
- platform: adc
pin: GPIO4
name: Tank Level
id: tank_level
update_interval: 60s
accuracy_decimals: 0
device_class: volume_storage
attenuation: auto
unit_of_measurement: "%"
filters:
- sliding_window_moving_average:
window_size: 20
send_every: 1
- offset: -0.72
- multiply: 54.0
- clamp:
max_value: 100
min_value: 0
binary_sensor:
- platform: analog_threshold
name: Level Low
sensor_id: tank_level
threshold:
lower: 30
upper: 50
filters:
- invert:
on_press:
script.execute: fill_tank
on_release:
- script.stop: fill_tank
- switch.turn_off: fill_valve
switch:
- platform: gpio
pin: GPIO03
restore_mode: always_off
name: Fill Valve
id: fill_valve
script:
- id: fill_tank
mode: restart
then:
- switch.turn_on: fill_valve
- delay: 2h
- switch.turn_off: fill_valve