I’ve been having a few issues with the water level in the ponds in the Garden, It’s a pretty complex setup with 3 ponds interconnected with streams. But I’ve been losing water through evaporation and occasionally from the streams themselves. So I thought I’d set myself a little challenge to build a wireless device that kept an eye on the levels to make sure the pump didn’t run dry from lack of water. I had enough little arduino bits lying around to create something so here’s the results.
It uses a proximity sensor set above the water to measure the level and I also added a temperature sensor to see what the weather was doing. I connected it all up to a small ESP8266 arduino so I could send the data over Wifi in real time. I then set up a Node JS server on heroku to receive the data which I’m sending data to every 10 minutes. This data is then stored in a simple mongo database. I built a front end monitoring website to keep on eye on everything and it seemed like a good idea to also have a low level warning system added. If the water gets to a low level, I used a free SMS service connected to the Node server to send me an text. Handy if om on holiday and need to get a neighbour to pop round to top it up. The whole device is mounted in a couple of tubes and water tight containers to keep everything dry. Seems to be working ok, just not sure how long the batteries will last, so may have to get clever and add a solar panel. The website to view that feed is here.
http://waterlevel001.herokuapp.com/

And here’s a few pictures of the work as it progressed.