Eric Martin <eric.joshua.martin@gmail.com> writes:
Hey all,
Hi, Eric.
I had a close call with my hot water heater this afternoon. I heard on odd noise in the pipes and it turned out that my hot water heater was dumping water out of the overflow valve. Luckily, I found it quick enough, and I'm pretty sure I got it handled for < $150. There's a 1 Gal bucket under the overflow valve, and if I had a water level detector emailing me that water is in the bucket, I could have caught this earlier.
You don't sound too sure that you have the problem licked. If that's the case, I would definitely have a plumber look at it. It's well worth the money (IMHO).
I was looking at buying an Arduino and setting up a simple circuit. I know a few people have played with Arduinos, any suggestions on which one to get and how to go about it? I don't need to know how much water is in the bucket, I was thinking about a float type device or even two wires that trip a relay. I just want a heads up that water is in the bucket so I can stop before my basement floods.
If you want to be paged or emailed, then I'd suggest something that can actually talk over the internet. You can get ethernet shields and even wifi shields for the arduino. However, the wifi shields are notoriously buggy. If I were to do this, I would likely just run ethernet and hook it up to a raspberry pi (it's overkill, but it will be cheaper than buying the arduino + ethernet shield). The raspi has GPIO pins that you can tap into for reading the sensor. Once you get your sensor and your embedded platform of choice, folks on the list will be better able to give you specific advice on wiring things up (if you need it). Good luck! -Jeff