Having recently renovated our basement I came to a rude awakening about the ownership of a sump one afternoon when I entered our basement laundry room to find the floor covered with a sudsy (and who knows what else) mess.
A sump is basically a tank in the ground that collects water until it reaches a certain level and then a pump pumps it out. The type of water I'm talking about here is sewage and other forms of water that we need to pump out the sewer system of the home. As you can imagine you do not want this sump tank to overflow.
It is a "out of sight out of mind" type of system. You take it for granted, that it will do its job as you go about daily living. You can't really even see how much water is in the sump and you are rarely even around it.
This project takes advantage of a couple of pretty simple concepts and adds a good bit of value in a pretty cheap do-it-yourself way by leveraging use of a ultrasonic distance sensor and a microcontroller board that has an audio amplifier integrated.
This simple sump monitor utilizes an ESP32 development board (2432S028-R aka CYD or cheap yellow display) that has a display and an audio amplifier to monitor the sump capacity using a JSN-SR04T distance sensor.
The sensor has enough range to sense the bottom of the tank and enough accuracy to know within (say 10 cm) that the level of fluid in the tank has risen to a point that is not normal. The software will let you alter the volume of the alarm and the level at which the alarm will sound. History of fluid levels is graphed on the display. The display is touchscreen so you can use it to set the alarm level and the volume. It also tracks the minimum and maximum recorded levels and up time.
It is worth noting that the reading is not an indication of fluid level, rather it is an indication of tank capacity (a bit of a reversal of thought) so a low reading in this case is bad and a high reading (lots of capacity) is good.
There may also be times of unexpected volatility in the readings. I believe this is due to the nature of the environment in the sump as described in this video.
The software is available on GitHub. While there are no guarantees that it will save you from a messy disaster it could do so, and it's better than no monitoring at all!
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