“This project controls the water pump automatically for a multi-storied building and saves water and electricity.
The Problem
Almost all multi-storied buildings in Bangladesh contain a water tank in the roof and a water reservoir in the ground. An electric pump is used to pump the water from the reservoir to the water tank on the rooftop. In most of the building, the system is manual and a person manually turns off the pump when the water tank becomes full. This manual process always creates waste of valuable water and indirectly creates waste of electricity as well. An automatic system can solve the problem and save a large amount of water and electricity by automatically turning off the pump when the water tank becomes full and turning it on again when the tank needs to reload. Besides monitoring the water quality of the tank can give some important information about the water e.g. when to clean the tank.
Introduction
A few months back I was working with an automatic water monitoring and pump controller project. The main challenge I faced in that project was sending the sensor signal from the rooftop tank to the groundwater reservoir. I used a waterproof ultrasonic sensor to measure the water level of the tank and a pH sensor to measure the pH. Measuring those parameters was very easy but sending those values from the rooftop tank to the bottom pump of a multi-storied building was a real challenge. First, I tried with a low-cost radio transmitter and receiver but did not get a good response. Then I tried with nRF24L01 with an external antenna but still faced some issues because several concrete floors were present in between. Then I decided to use LoRa but Suddenly I came to know about Sparkfun single-pair ethernet module and MicroMod board for single-pair ethernet. I know this may be the perfect solution for this purpose because as it is a wired communication concrete floors and other barriers inside the building will not be a problem for the communication. As single-pair ethernet can work more than 1 km this can be used for all types of high-rise buildings. The SparkFun MicroMod Single Pair Ethernet Kit contains an Esp32 processor module that can be used to upload the data to the cloud so that water level, pump status, and water quality can be remotely monitored.
Recently, I received a SparkFun MicroMod Single Pair Ethernet Kit and in this project, I am going to use that kit for finishing my previous project. Instead of the ultrasonic sensor, I will use the SparkFun Distance Sensor for water level measurement because I found some power-related issues with the ultrasonic sensor. I hope the ToF range finder will be more power convenient than the ultrasonic range finder. For water quality monitoring I will use pH and ORP sensors. I will use the Arduino IDE for interfacing the sensors and controlling the pump. For remote monitoring, I will use the Blynk cloud platform.
Connection Diagram
The connection among the components from the tank side is as follows. Here I added a PH sensor and ORP sensor for measuring the water quality with the level of water which is measured by the TOF distance sensor.”