A few corrections:1) s/overflow/pressure relief/g
(Apparently I typed overflow valve, meant pressure relief valve, it's been a long week.)
2) Furnace tech already looked at it and replaced one part, the Air vent valve. He also re-calibrated the heater for the correct quantity (apparently mine needs that) and the temp was turned up too high. I haven't touched it in 5 years so I'm not sure why it was a problem now, but I saw him do those things as well as replace the air vent valve on the furnace and so far, so good.
I impetus for the project isn't to delay fixing the problem, I already (hope) I have. This is to address the edge case that the pressure relief valve opens again either due to it leaking, or pressure building up. I wrote this email right after a long day that was ended by vacuuming up my basement so I apparently was scant on the details, sorry!
On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 9:06 AM, Jeff Moyer
<jmoyer@redhat.com> wrote:
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
Jeff, the raspberry pi advice is exactly what I'm looking for. I was indeed thinking of using an arduino with an ethernet / wifi shield, but I'm open for ideas. Obviously low tech is a light / buzzer hooked up to a sensor, but I want to be notified as well if I'm not home. I haven't played with arduino or raspberry pi yet so I guess I'm a blank slate. I'll poke around a bit more, I honestly hadn't even considered raspberry pi. I'll look a few pages to see what I like and what the pricing is and get back to you, thanks!
--
Eric Martin