Water well system automation

[Ira]

I'm on my own own water well system. Four inch well with a 1.5hp submersible pump. that provides water for my home and my lawn irrigation system. The well, a 120 gallon galvanized water tank, water softener for home, and master control valve for irrigation system are located in an 8'X14' "well house". There is a "T" on the downstream outlet from the tank, with one side going to the softener then to my home, and the other side going to my master control valve then out to the yard valves/zones. I plan on adding a pressure regulator downstream from the water softener, and a backflow preventer between the "T" and the master control valve soon. Also on the home line between the softener and the regulator, I'm installing a flow switch that opens (or closes) a dry contact when a certain flow rate has been exceeded. It can be set to open/close at any flow between one and 20 gallons per minute. All of these will be in the well house. I'm also installing a device called a "cycle sensor" in the well pump circuit between the circuit breaker and the pressure switch that protects the pump from dry well situations and rapid cycle situations by shutting down power to the pump if either of those happen. My well house is 150' from my home. I have a "shop" that is about 10' from my home, and that is where my utility company power comes in then goes underground to my home. My standby generator is next to my shop, and the ATS for it is in the shop.

I had planned on adding some additional safeguards with some regular relays, switches, sensors, etc., but the HA bug has bitten me. I'm now looking at the same safeguards with a view towards HA, specifically Elk and CQC.

I will have leak sensors located in various places in my home and in the well house. The ones in the home will probably be the GE wireless sensors. The ones in the well house will be the GRI wired sensors. I will have a zone expansion board and output expansion board located in my shop, and I have room in conduits going between the shop and well house that I can use. My wired LAN also reaches out to my shop. My plan was to have the cycle sensor device first on the water well pump circuit. After the cycle sensor, I would have a DPST relay that would be used to control the power to the pump via Elk and/or CQC. Is there any reason to use the Elk heavy duty relay instead of a off-the-shelf relay since I will have the zone and output expansions boards nearby, assuming that the Elk output is enough to energize the relay coil and the relay contactors can handle the pump? I would also have two DPDT manual bypass switches (one to bypass the cycle sensor, one to bypass the relay) in case one or both devices causes problems. I'm also thinking about adding a water meter with a pulse output to track water usage. I will probably install something like the Elk water shutoff valve near the new pressure regulator so I can shut off the pump and water to the home (remaining water in the tank) if a problem occurs. The only other thing I can think of to add is a pressure sensor/switch that can be used to shut off the pump if a certain pressure is reached. A manual reset would be required, since it would indicate a potential problem.

I already use dataloggers to log start/stop for the water well pump, water softener regeneration start/stop, and irrigation system start/stop. They can be read over the LAN, so I plan on writing some programs to analyze the logger data and feed some of the results to CQC, for example, the softener is probably low on salt, etc.

So, are there any problems or areas of concern in this plan (other than costing a lot)? Anything I'm leaving out? Any other comments.

Thanks,
Ira

 

[DavidL]

Are you in a climate that doesn't freeze? You didn't mention any protection or sensing for that.
Let mechanical sensors do the "heavy" lifting like regulating pressure. Let the ELK do the next level of monitoring, and let CQC display those results to you on non ELK interfaces.

You could use CQC to graph results. If there is interest, we can adapt our TChart application to work with CQC.

David
Tallus LLC

 

[Ira]

Are you in a climate that doesn't freeze? You didn't mention any protection or sensing for that.
Let mechanical sensors do the "heavy" lifting like regulating pressure. Let the ELK do the next level of monitoring, and let CQC display those results to you on non ELK interfaces.

You could use CQC to graph results. If there is interest, we can adapt our TChart application to work with CQC.

David
Tallus LLC

I live in SE Texas, 15 miles from the coast, so freezing is not much of an issue. I don't think it has gone below freezing for more than a few hours around here for ten years. With that said, I have in the past thought about it. I have an Oregon Scientific WMR100 weather station and a temp/humidity sensor in the well house. My plan was that if it ever got cold enough, I would turn on a small space heater out there. It would be nice to have that automated somewhat. Maybe have the heater on a relay controlled by an Elk output that is controlled by CQC or by the Elk sensing freezing temperature in the well house.

My plan is to have the GE wireless water sensors and the GRI wired water sensors hooked up to various zones in the Elk depending on the sensor location. If the Elk detects a leak, it can close the water supply valve and energize (or maybe de-energize, depending on failsafe direction) a relay I will use to control power to the pump after the cycle sensor. I will also tap off the cycle sensor output lugs to energize/de-energize a relay coil whose contacts will be used as dry contacts for another Elk zone so I can detect that the cycle sensor had detected a fault and shut off power to the pump. Unfortunately, there's no way to tell remotely which of the faults the cycle sensor detected, except maybe a camera that points at the cycle sensor LED screen. Maybe one more relay energized by a wire off of the line side of the pump's pressure switch to verify that there is power getting to it, i.e., neither the cycle sensor nor the water sensors have detected a problem requiring that power to the pump be shut off.

I will read up on TChart. The datalogger software contains graphing capabilities, but it's pretty basic. The logger software can be set up to read the dataloggers and write out a CSV file automatically at a specified time interval. It would be good to have the ability to do better graphing with the data. I also have TED (The Energy Detective) which can also export a CSV file. I may switch to the Brultech ECM-1240 soon, though.