Hey guys, My boss runs all his servers in his cellar at home split between two rooms each with a de-humidifier in. The problem is that if he forgets (and often does) to empty the water containers they shut down until they are emptied. What he would like to do is to have each one feeding into a large bucket taht could be emptied via a pump. The question I am asking is; does anyone know of a circuit that when activated by a water sensor (2 bits of wire, low tech here) would give an output of say 12v to trip a relay and hence run the pump for a set amount of time? Obviously being able to vary the amount of time the pump rums for would be a good plan as some seting up would be needed. I would think that the pumps would only need to be run for 30secs to 1min at most when the bucket is full. Thanks for any help you can give me on this
surely it would be simpler to just run piping from the dehumidifiers to wherever you're planning to drain the water? You're going to have to run a pipe from the pump regardless. Or are you having to send water 'uphill'? There was a Dick Smith project that did water level sensing via some wires...you could have two sets, turn the pump on when the level hits the top one and off when the level drops below the bottom one. Washing machine pumps are great for this sort of thing, as they run off the mains and are reasonably powerful. You just need to be careful of air and gunk getting into the pump, as they don't respond well. I've built a closed hydroponics system with one, using relays to drive the pump. The best part about washing machine pumps is that you can get them for cheep-cheep from most shops that deal with appliance repairs
Two ways to do this, 1. Use a PIC 2. Use 2 float switches and a 2-pole relay Code: Shi 12v--+----o/ o-----+----Relay coil-------- 0v | | +-o/ o---o/ o-+ L----o/ o---Pump---N Slo Rs1 Rs2 When the water level reaches the higher switch Shi it turns the relay on & latches it on with 1 pole Rs1 until the lower switch Slo breaks. Second pole Rs2 runs the pump.
Yeah, I am going to have to run the water uphill as the cellar is below the level of the drains. Thanks for the pointers about the washing machine pumps, I will have to have a look and see how much they are going to be. I am going to have a second set of wires above the sensor set to kill the de-humidifier completely if the water level gets too high due to the pumps failing or something. Don't want to flood his cellar. Just need to work out the circuits for it now
