Bucket water level sensor?

[Tomáš Mládek]

Hi, I want to build my own automatic watering system, with the reservoir being just an ordinary bucket. There's a number of options to detect water level, from the top off my head:

1. Ultrasound sensor
2. Weight/pressure sensor
3. Floating sensor
4. Contact-less sensor
5. Droplet sensors

et cetera.

What I want is just to detect when to refill the bucket, i.e. not much resolution is needed, I basically only need two states - "enough" and "empty". However, I'd rather have something that doesn't stick out too badly and can be easily hidden just so that the bucket is visible.

Can I maybe just stick two wires in the water, connect one to +5V and periodically read the other as GPIO? Would the conductivity of water be enough for this to work? Or maybe, are there other problems with this?

Thanks in advance!

[gohan]

if you use a pressure sensor in the pipe below the bucket you could calculate the height of the water in the bucket (also anything else measuring the weight could be used). Otherwise you could try to do an analog read on 2 cables (you could use set a digital pin HIGH, wait a few seconds and then to a read on an analog pin, then set digital pin LOW to save battery) in the bucket and when water no longer touches the cables you should not get any voltage or at least a much lower value, could be worth trying

[hek]

You could also detect when bucket is empty by measuring the power consumption of the pump motor.

[gohan]

@hek Maybe he would like to know a little more in advance before it gets dry empty