Wireless, Battery-Powered, Water Detector

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1

This is my take on a water detector. This one will:

  • Send Home Assistant an MQTT message when it detects water. HA will then notify me via pushbullet and email notifications.
  • Keep HA informed of its battery status so you can replace the battery before it goes dead.
  • Run on a small LiPO battery for at least three months before requiring recharge.

All details may be found at
https://github.com/andres-leon/wireless-water-detector

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Thanks for share and very interesting for small leak detectors around water heater :wink: Will probably build similar one based on your one but using HA API and ESPHome for ESP for easier integration in HA yet !

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Thank you. I’ve not looked at ESPHome yet so that may be for a future upgrade. Although, to be honest, the HA integration was by far the simplest part of this project :slight_smile:

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I decided to spend an inordinate amount of time, money, and effort into creating a water alarm device …

Everybody needs a hobby. :wink:

For those who want an inexpensive, ready-made, water sensor with a long battery life and excellent range, consider an RF 433Mhz device. Here are two examples:

There are at least three different RF 433 MHz bridges available that convert the received data into an MQTT payload:

  • Sonoff RF Bridge flashed with Tasmota or Espurna or OpenMQTTGateway firmware
  • OpenMQTTGateway using an Arduino or ESP8266 or ESP32
  • rtl_433 using an SDR (Software Defined Radio)

The author of OpenMQTTGateway (OMG) maintains a list of devices that have been tested with OMG.

It’s nice to have ready-made options but if you prefer building your own sensors, then the ESP8266 is the popular starting point.

EDIT
Of the three listed RF bridges, the one requiring no hardware assembly or firmware flashing is an SDR with rtl_433 software. Next in line is the Sonoff RF bridge flashed with one of the listed firmware options. Finally, for tinkerers, there’s OMG running on hardware you build.

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very cool.

I like tinkering too (i guess we pretty much all do or we wouldn’t be using HA in the first place :grinning:) and this looks like a pretty good inspiration for other sensors.

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Cool idea, I am also working on similar project. honestly I found your setup is bit expensive (its just my opinion :smile:) I don’t want to spend no more than CAD $10 to build this.

my goal is to build to detect water leak, daily battery level notification and deep sleep with battery life of more than an year.

Here are the parts I used:
ESP 12E, 3.3v active buzzer, voltage regulator HT7333 (optional) and a cheap battery operated cabinet LED light (for housing the esp and buzzer) - it comes with AAA battery slot so no need to buy additional battery holder or 3D print the housing.

My main problem was the code, seems ESP8266 doesn’t support GPIO external interrupt. it is good for timer wake up and run the task like battery operated weather station.

I am going to replace esp8266 with esp32 which has many options to wake up the main processor and run the task.

Waiting for ESP32 shipment from China, will update this form once I build and tested it.

In the meantime I am building Auto shut off valve with D1 mini, motor driver and low voltage DC motor.

Cheers!
SK

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Cool idea! Looking forward to seeing your setup :slight_smile:

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@gsksim, did you end up building something :slightly_smiling_face: