I know this subject has been discussed here quite a bit and spent some time reading post. Years ago I built a sensor to find the water level in my well using thermistors a few resistors and a 555 timer also some led's. Basically I dropped a long wire down the 6" casing and the thermistor would sense a difference between the the air and the water.
I would like to incorporate this into a Arduino some how, the well is 37' deep and was looking for some guidance for the code. Thanks
What is the resistance of your thermister? What did the 555 do? Why not just use your Arduino in a standard temperature measuring circuit. There must be hundreds of forum posts relating to that.
So that was something I did years ago to test the well after finding that my well wasn't producing enough water .I had to put a tank in my basement to hold enough water. I then on a weekly basis dropped the thermistors down the well on a telephone wire to find the depth and when it hit water it would light a led . My idea here was to do that with several sensors ,leave in the well and remotely view the status from the house. Sorry for the long answer thermistor was a 1k .thanks for reading
Yes I could just read the sensor as you suggest ,the issue would be over time the sensor ,wires and anything in the well would rot, not to mention possible pollute the well.
You might consider using an ultrasonic distance sensor then. Google that.
how much variation in water level is there?
Could you mount a laser or ultrasonic distance sensor above the water
have a look at Pololu proximity-sensors-and-range-finders
for example
the VL53L3CX TOF sensor has a maximum range of 5mretres
the Maxbotix XL-MaxSonar-EZ2 Sonar Range Finder MB1220 ultrasonic sensors has a maximum range of 7.65 metres
I have used a JSN-SR04T waterproof ultrasonic sensor (maximum range 4.5metres) to measure river level height uploading data over LoRaWAN
Actually put one together a few years ago playing around with it as an intruder detection idea. I was attempting that but then found that the signal being sent over600’ to my WiFi device was too far without some sort of repeater and gave up. Either way if it was wireless or powered that was an issue. So I didn’t really go anywhere with it plus the fact moisture problems for using the device would degrade over time. But thanks for that thought, maybe it’s time to reconsider that.
Ultrasonic transducers are available with waterproof coatings. Wireless options other than wifi are available, e.g. LoRa.
As permanent solution I would look at using a hydrostatic level sensor with a 0-5V analog output. Drop it down the well and connect to an analog input. From there it's trivial to get an relatively accurate measure of the water level above the transducer. You can then get more complicated and send that value to a display, a warning lamp or even feed it to a server to view it on your phone.
That's probably going to be a more robust method than dropping a string of thermistors down the hole.
Ok , not familiar with any of that and how does LoRa help?Looking it up now
Looking up that suggestion, read up on it and believe that would be a great option, thanks.