Hello! My dad has a water tank in the basement, and we have to manually fill it, which means knowing how much water is in the tank at all times would be really helpful. Any ideas on a circuit/device that could detect how much water is in the tank? I was thinking:
(1.)
-Measuring via distance- can ultrasonic distance sensors detect distance to water accurately?
-Measuring via some sort of impedance strip (strip that detects liquid level)
-Problem with this method is I can't find a strip long enough (Tank is about 3 feet/1 meter deep)
-Other measurement methods?
(2.)
Curious how you guys would relay the information from the sensor to the human - How does the human see the final measurement display?
-Simple LED display?
-Some sort of LED diode lineup, from red to green (empty to full)?
-Other ideas?
(3.)
Lastly, I would love to eventually bring this information to the ioT world, and read the information from a web server.
I'm very much a beginner. I have Arduino's, rasp. pi's, and some sensor kits, but no real project experience to speak of, although I'm great with electronics stuff in general. What do you guys think the best solution to this problem is? The basement where the water tank is is not accessible from the house, you have to go outside to get into the basement. Although all the networking equipment is also down there, aka I could connect straight to the modem/router if I wanted to.
The pressure at the bottom of the tank is proportional to the height of the water in the tank. It is very simple to connect a 5V fluid pressure sensor to Arduino, and convert the reading to gallons of water.
Tell us more about the tank, how it is drained and filled, etc.
No mention of tank shape or capacity? Id the tank vented or sealed? My first choice would likely be to use a bubbler sensor. A Google of liquid level bubbler should get you plenty of hits. Anyway the best way to go about sensing liquid level in a tank depends on you tank and your environment. It's all in the details.
I'm not quite sure what it's capacity is, maybe a couple hundred gallons? It is just a plain bucket style tank, I will add a picture. The way the water system works, is we siphon the water from the well via a long 3/4 inch plastic hose, once the siphon gets going it is then connected to another hose that leads into the basement and into the tank. It is a very old school and simple water system.
Well along the lines of a bubbler if the tank has an exit port at the bottom just measure the pressure. Figure 1.0 PSI is 27.7076 inches of water column in the tank.
That or just use a float switch positioned close to the bottom of the tank.
if the area has WiFi coverage you could use an ESP32 which has onboard WiFi, Bluetooth Classic and BLE to view your data, e.g. run a webserver on the ESP32 which displays the data you can view with laptop, smartphone etc
