In developing countries, where water isn’t supplied by municipalities often, especially India, you will find millions of bore-wells people use for water supply. Water is pumped and stored in tanks, which are generally on the top floors making it difficult to do visual check of water levels. Folks have to constantly keep an eye on their tank water levels to turn on the motor pump in time or suddenly they might find they are out of water! Once you turn on motor pump, you have to monitor water levels in tank, to turn off! Otherwise, if the tank gets full water will overflow and gets wasted. I often notice, when I travel to India, that water is overflowing on to streets because they forgot to turn the motor off!
It is almost ritualistic for folks to go through the dance of managing the water supply and results in terrible wastage of following resources:
– Water, no doubt
– Electricity
– Efforts, Time and Energy of a human resource!
All of the above results in enormous wastage of financial resources. Now, imagine the wastage happening every day across millions of homes in India. This is a problem not just in third world countries, if you google it (for ex like this ) you will see people are looking for solutions all over the globe! Now, this is a #ProWoSo!
Lets see, if we can figure a high level solution, with the latest tech around us. Any solution to automate this needs to monitor water levels, needs to turn off motor at the minimum and the niceties to have could be like, you can set the water level you want, automatically turn the motor on when needed (for low levels) with a manual override and if you can control all of this via smartphone!
To monitor the water levels, you use sonic sensors or rely on pressure switches but a simple solution like resistance circuits will work fine and is reliable as shown here . As the power is generally not available at the tank you need run the wire, perhaps along the water pipe to the power outlet where motors control box is. This should work for most of household scenarios unless you are trying this in a farm.
Once we have the water levels next we need feed that, to a controller that turns, on/off of the motor, which is doable with the awesome open source arduino board! You may also want to add a voltmeter to display the levels for visual check, of course you have to map the voltage to the water levels. We also need a level setting control, that is mapped from voltage to levels and to be accurate perhaps it is better to leverage the Arduino’s analog-to-digital conversion to map back to the right levels of water. If we want to be more user friendly, we could perhaps add wifi capability along with an Android app to monitor and control the water levels, similar to this wifi controlled car!
There you have it, now go solve it for the sake of our earth! Once again, this idea just a thought…our idea is not give you a thorough step by step solution but present you the problem and get you some ideas to get started! Good Luck!
[Photo Credit: Thanks to Efraimstochter via Pixabay]
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