I live on a rural property and while I’m reorganising my water storage I want to add tank level monitoring which works with home assistant. As we’re entirely reliant on tank water, monitoring levels is essential for our sustainability.
What I’m after is something non-custom because I know that if I build a something ESPHome-based it’ll break at the worst possible time, need debugging, parts which take weeks to arrive and it’ll happen right when I need to know that a tank has unexpectedly dropped in level indicating a leak.
- 2.4GHz WiFi may work for existing tanks, but not future planned ones due to distances of 200m - 300m (650’ to 1000’) through trees. Still, one of our large tanks is borderline on WiFi given about 100m through trees even through I’ve got a directional AP aimed in that direction.
- Ability to easily be solar/battery powered, or last for 1+ years on replaceable batteries.
- Reporting frequency needs to be <1 hour for the larger tanks and I will have at least smaller 3 surge tanks which need <10 minute updates.
- Available to Australia and work on the legal frequencies here (eg: 915MHz not 850MHz)
- Must be local network accessible and not require cloud connection.
I do not currently use LoRaWAN or Meshtastic but willing to consider it. I do use Zigbee and 2.4/5GHz WiFi, but not 915MHz (802.11ah).
I’m reluctant to go for a proprietary system with an interface such as modbus simply due to past experience where these kinds of things will be deprecated and need to replace the whole system.