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Sump Pump Monitoring

 

juren
New Member Registered
Joined: 1 year ago
Posts: 1
Topic starter  

I can use some help and/or suggestions on the topic of monitoring my sump pump.

The pump is a rather dumb device except it does automatically empties the container when it the water reaches a certain level.  What it does not do and I would like to monitor is how often the pump is activated and empties the container.  I would like to find a smart plug that I can plug the pump into that reports to Home Assistant when it detects a load i.e. the pump has run for xx seconds.

Any ideas or suggestions?


   
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bauerpower.tech
Member Admin
Joined: 1 year ago
Posts: 4
 

First of all, welcome to the Geek Forums Juren!  This is a brand new site and I appreciate you being the first poster.  WELCOME!

That is absolutely doable.  It is actually the same thing I am doing to monitor my coffee pot, washing machine, and other plugged in devices.  I attached a screen shot of my power monitoring dashboard and you can see the pot of coffee I just made as the yellow spike.

What I use is a Sonoff S31 Smart Plug flashed with Tasmota and integrated with Home Assistant.  I have a how-to video explaining how to flash it on YouTube here. Make sure you don't get the Sonoff S31 "Lite" as it doesn't have energy monitoring, only power on/off.  The flashing procedure in my video is a little dated.  It's actually easier now that Tasmota has a web based flash utility.  

The great thing about Tasmota and Home Assistant is all the data stays on your local network and will continue to work even if you lose internet connection.

This setup is of course assuming you have 120V electricity.  

I don't know your skill level so this might all seem intimidating.  If you want to keep it simple, Tasmota will emulate a Hue Bridge which allows it to be added effortlessly with Alexa or Google Assistant and then you can use the IFTTT skill to send you notifications when the power rises above X.  I haven't tried this method but it should work.  

Keeping it simpler yet, you could just use the Sonoff S31 out of the box with the Sonoff app but it's going to require the cloud and setting up an account with a company in China, which I try to avoid.

If the soldering/flashing part is intimidating, I could flash one for you and send you one.  I have a few ready in the drawer.

Let me know if you have any other questions.  I hope this helps.

 

Thanks again for stopping by!

 

Jake Bauer


   
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bauerpower.tech
Member Admin
Joined: 1 year ago
Posts: 4
 

I also just noticed you wanted a run time counter for the pump.  To do this, in Home Assistant, it's easiest to set up a time pattern trigger automation that checks the power level every so often (every 5 seconds?) and increments a counter.  Since the pump only runs for a few seconds at a time usually, you'll need it to check pretty regularly.  Don't worry about frequent checks bogging down your system; they only take a fraction of a second and require almost no processing power.  

My automation to check my furnace run time looks like this.  it only checks if my furnace is running once every minute so you'll want to change the time pattern to something faster but, otherwise, it should be pretty much the same.

Keep in mind that with time pattern, the time period is weird.  So in my example below, it's actually checking once per minute when the second counter is on 1 second.  So seconds are counting 57, 58, 59, 0, 1 ...TRIGGER.  Make sense?

alias: HVAC increment heating counter
description: ""
trigger:
  - platform: time_pattern
    seconds: "1"
condition:
  - condition: state
    entity_id: sensor.hvac_thermostat_action
    state: heating
action:
  - service: counter.increment
    target:
      entity_id: counter.hvac_heating_minutes_counter
    data: {}
mode: single

   
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