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Basement monitor

Introduction

Basement flooding is a common problem. Though we have a sump pump to ensure that water table level is below the floor of the basement occasionally they do fail or do not work due to various reasons. Yet a another unusual circumstance is during winter; pipes do freeze if the temperature is too low causing basement flooding.

To address this problem I’ve built a monitoring system that uses a rain water sensor to monitor if there is any stagnant water in the basement. It samples the data every 3 minutes and send the data to Thingspeak servers the values read. Rain water sensor has two outputs.

• Digital output: it is high normally but when the sensor senses moisture, based on the settings on the sensor, will go low when moisture is sensed.
• Analog output: It produces a voltage, 0-3.3V depending on the moisture content. The sensor has high impedance when dry and the voltage is near to 3.3V when the sensor is totally dry. As the sensor gets wet the impedance goes low and the output voltage from the sensor drops towards zero as it gets wet.

In the remaining sections I go over the program that reads the sensor values, transmits the value to Thingspeak server; this service collects the data and when abnormality is realized through a bridge of other networks notifies me as with an SMS text.