Now, some “intro” around this project…
Home Assisttant is a great automation tool for domotic. There are lot of examples around about home automations, but almost none about swimming pool.
Although you can surely say that not everyone has a pool in their house, only in my country there are 1.2 million pools, most of them are small private pools.
And there are one more thing: maintenance of a swimming pool is a very laborious and constant task, where automation can save, not only a lot of time (and money) for the maintainers, but a lot of water for the planet.
Unfortunately, in the residential environment, the annual complete water renewal for each summer period is habitual, so I estimate that more than 30 million m3 of purified!!! water are wasted annually (only in my country) due to the complete filling of swimming pools for the season of bathroom.
There are many causes that justify this behavior, but surely one of the most important is the high cost of an automation system for a pool.
This is surely the most important reason that has driven me to create and share this project:
Create a cost-effective, easy-to-install, easy-to-build, Swimmig Pool Automation System for all people with the minimum and simple filter and satinization system
This is the first part of the project (only lot of yaml config files in github), to control a minimal and carefully selected hardware after many surveys, to has basic but powerful automation system.
But there are a lot of work for the future. Mainly to document lots of instructions for people outside of all these technologies (surely all here know the importance but workload of documentation…)
There are some similar projects around (mainly based on node-red and node-js systems), but, in my opinion, they are projects to control systems of specific (and usually closed) manufacturers, or they are projects very specifically oriented to the needs of their creators.
My intention is create a system where the “the peripherals” (motor pumps, peristaltic pumps for injection of chemicals, chlorinators and dispensers), are as dumb (and cheap) as possible, and all intelligence is centralized in a mini-box wit a raspberry pi and cost-efective-but-reliable hardware “easy to istall, easy to obtain, update and mantain”.
I am aware that in a control system of a swimming pool there are always a lot of things that can fail (and really fail), and that is why I have put a lot of intelligence in notifying any anomaly that goes out of the “expected” thing, before wanting to regulate it all without any human intervention (It is better to notify that the alleged injection of chlorine does not seem to work, to find that the system has emptied the bleach tank in the pool overnight)
Now, I just hope there are more people to try and help improve this project.
Thanks