Looking for ideas how to generate a monitoring/control for a drain pump (heating/aircondition water)

General
1

Hi,
background:
I am using node-red for my smart home since some years with basic features and just started to dig deaper :grinning_face:

story:
water in the cellar - drain pump was ok - inflow was stuffed with mud :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Now as we had water in the cellar because the drain pump was not getting anything to pump because it was blocked just before it - the alarm for pump failing which is allready monitored - did not throw an alert :rofl:

So what I wanted since a long time:
ideas and logic

  • check how often the pump is running
    (under different scenarios like winter/rain/summer
  • generate something like a "running-factor" per day
  • create limits and set different alarms ...

technical question:
I allready log the pump through a power monitor and get values like this (time is not attached yet but that is in my scope of capabilities

What would be the easiest way to collect those values (as long as the pump is running - some seconds only) I want to save this as a "run" with "start-time" and "run-time".
(For long time checks I will log it in a txt file and in an influxdb for later analysies)

But how could I create something like a round robin list for a day?
Is there a build in feature like this (or should I just use a function node to code that - I guess I could manage this)

0
0
0
0
68.3
66.11
64.79
40.5
0
0
0

I guess this could be quite interessting for anybody with a device that is not constantly up and running with no directly other connected paramters which can be controlled.

Best regards for any tipps or ideas
Antonio

2

I know you are looking for pump ideas but have you also considered a water level monitor?

1 Like
3

Also. They make relatively cheap flow meters.

4

I think @gerry has a good point. Any time that you want to be sure that something is working correctly then fully independent alarm detection is the ideal solution.

1 Like
5

Thank you for this tip - I didnt want to write too much in my initial post - the water level monitor is just 15cm near the pump - the amount of water which was stopped in the chimney within the wall - was soaked up by the bricks and just showed up after 2 weeks or so. The screed is only "not dry" and showed same salt extractions - but it is not "wet" enough to start the water monitor - which is totally ok and working.

6

The amount of liquid that "drops" from the chimney is in my opinion even too small to use a mechanical flow meter - and the water contains small parts of ashes so I guess it would break the thing over time. Good electrical inductions sensors would be a different scope and project :laughing: and I am not the perfect bread board designer ...

7

Fully agree, but did not find a (cheap and easy) solution yet.

8

How is the pump powered? You should find readily available power monitors. From that you can compile all sorts of data to help you with monitoring/automation.

9

If you are already using InfluxDB, wouldn't that be the answer to the data question? Throw them into InfluxDB and then you can use it's timeseries calculation capabilities.

10

Sorry for my late reply, I am sure that would be awesome but I am not so deep into influxdb - I just put lots of data in to check/compare several values. I wanted to do a lot more - but life is to short for all those places ... . (I still do have troubles to understand why influxdb does not like my 0 values - and how to fix that) Which is one of my favourite tasks to check for ON/OFF values but that is out of scope now and his thread :grin:

Thank you for the tip! pinned a digital card on my digital wallpaper with influxdb reports and actions!

11

For all guessing what I do now:

  • getting a new spare pump for the worst case

  • tested the water alarm

  • tested the "alert" sensor-cable which should close/open in case of an detected error within the pump

  • But for the case of all other situations - I did a multilevel monitoring (as allready mentioned the pump itself is not the technical problem)

short reduced description:

  • I collect all the values - every time the "Smart Meter" decides to send data

    • every time a value greater than 0 is a "pumprun" starts, evrey time 0 comes again the "pumprun" is closed. The collected data is merched into a JSON with pumprun data and subdata (in the case I do need further investigation later on)
    • every hour a script goes through the data-file where all JSON strings are stored and generate those values:

  • run/ hour

  • run/ day

  • run/ week

  • run/ month

  • (duration of the pumprun - as soon as I have collected enough valuable data)

Now another task is peridicaly 4 times a day checking those values, depending on summer/winter/heating is on/off/rain is on/off :wink: different min/max vales are defined to be ok, otherwise a visuel wet-wall check expert (any family member) is called to check the heating room

we will see whats next to happen that is not checked ... yet

12

Do start a new thread for that, I am sure we can help you fix it.