Been thinking of a way to turn the lights on when I turn the water on using the battery powered touch faucet. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to do it?
I’m having a hard time picturing a situation where you could get to the water to turn it on in the dark. Usually the lights coming on is the first thing you want to have happen. But “my use case is not your use case” so if it makes sense to your situation then, yes, you can do it.
The usual way is to replace the batteries with a mains-powered dummy battery, plug that into something that measures the current draw, and then trigger the lights off of the increase in the current draw. You can usually do that without reengineering the battery powered device. They might be some safety issues in doing that with a faucet, though. I looked quickly at some of the systems available for quads, and most of the ones that are mains-powered seem to be using a stepdown on the current for safety reasons. So that complicates everything.
It might be simpler to use A vibration sensor on the pipes there. I like that idea little better then a flood detector, because the problem with the flood detector is it will work the first time you turn on the faucet, but after that the detector will be wet for a while which complicates things.
The vibration sensor, though, could be more easily isolated to the exact time when the water is running.
But then, I have to kind of wonder why not just use a motion sensor in the same area to pick up the person?
But anyway those are some options, I’m sure there are more.
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It’s not that is dark in the kitchen when I turn the water on. I have a recessed light right above the sink and we 9nly use it when the water runs. I have it on the motion sensor, but that motion turns all lights in the kitchen. The idea came to me based on the discussion we had last week around this subject.
I see. Well, then you have two approaches I’d consider.
The first is just to put the recessed light on its own separate motion sensor. That does seem simplest.
After that, the vibration sensor on the water pipes. but I imagine it will take some trial and error to get that calibrated.
Far from A CLEAN INSTALL, but that would all depend on where the faucet is you want to monitor. Mount a remote moisture sensor behind or even under the sink. Put the probes in the bottom of the sink under the faucet. Water comes on, contacts connect, lights on .
Somebody made a water flow meter, designed to go on the main water line coming into the house. I don’t remember the specifics, but I would assume you could put it on the pipe under the sink . If it detected any water flow it would send trigger. That would be an expensive solution, if I remember they were about $300 each.
I’d go with @JDRoberts solution of just putting that one light on its own and not connected to all the other lights .
Now you have me designing a solution for the motion detector not seeing the wife over the shower curtain and shutting off the lights on her mid shower. Moisture sensor in/on the shower drain. If wet it overides the PIR and leaves lights on.
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We’ve discussed the use of moisture sensors for showers before, and one of the problems is that once the contacts are wet, they take awhile to dry out. So it all comes down to the details of these cases. They can work for showers in some households, but if you have two people, or one person who for whatever reason ends up taking multiple showers sometimes, it’s possible that only the first shower of the day would be detected.
It seems to me that’s even more of an issue for a kitchen sink, where the sink may be used more often than the moisture sensor is able to detect.
Some people have gone for humidity sensors for shower detection, which have the advantage that the humidity drops back down fairly quickly. There’s one pretty sophisticated method in the following topic:
And some people have gone for the vibration sensor on the water pipes. @jmay33 has done some work on this for his medical smart home project.
I want to try to convert the batteries into a power adapter and then plug the adapter into a metering device like Aeon or Wemo insight. Thanks for your suggestions.
Just make sure it’s a GFCI outlet…
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=
Profit.
As soon as you detect that there is flow through the tap, trigger the light to come on.
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I like that idea, except for whole having to build my own control for it. I am sure I would screw something up somewhere along the way. In my scenario I could put that inside the wall behind the shower. Safe and dry (hopefully).
Well, you could still keep it very simple, and avoid the Arduino and ThingShield if desired. Using the FlowMeter listed above by @Benji, you could feed its output into a time-delay relay. Then attached the Time-Delay relay’s output to the screw terminals of an inexpensive door/window contact sensor.
The time delay relay will hold its output high as long as the input is pulsing (which is how most flow meters output a signal) and thus keep the contact sensor high without a continuous on/off stream of data to the ST hub. Once the water is turned off, the relay will shut off within a second or two.
Note: You could also very easily just use a cheap Arduino to behave like the time-delay relay, and have it connected to the inexpensive contact sensor’s screw terminals.
Lot’s of ways to handle this…
Dan
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