Utilitech / Everspring Water Sensor - Help!

I purchased a Utilitech / Everspring Water Sensor for my sump pump. My house sits on a spring and I wanted to use it to monitor how often my sump pump cycles. Since my sump pit is always filled with water the sensor will be submerged in water, thus reporting back as wet. When the pump kicks on the water level will drop and the sensor will report as dry until the pump kicks off and the water level immediately rises back up to cover the sensor.

In theory, this would work great. However, I just discovered that the sensor has a detection level of one minute. Therefore, if the senor is wet, becomes dry and then gets wet again…it will report as wet, then immediately report as dry but will not report wet again until 60 seconds has passed. The issue is that my sump pit may kick on and off multiple times within one minute. Therefore, the sensor may “miss” some of the pump cycles.

Does anyone know of a way to shorten the detection interval? If not, then any other suggestions on a water sensor for my sump pit?

I am a bit of a novice here, but can you get a smart plug and monitor power draw from the sump pump?

That may work but it is nice using the water sensor and IFTTT to write to a google spreadsheet each time the sensor is triggered.

I just stumped across a post where a guy built a water sensor by hacking a Monoprice Open / Close sensor. That may be the road that I have to go down and I cannot get the water sensor that I have to work.

How did they do that? Did they have one side of the sensor on the plunger wire and the other mounted somewhere? That’s a pretty cool thing however they did it.

See here - Made a Water Leak Sensor

Why not just mount the water sensor up the side of the sump well so that the contacts don’t become submerged until the level where the pump is almost ready to kick off? Unless you’ve got a really fast filling sump well then that should give you the info you’re looking for.

My suggestion would be to use an accelerometer to determine how often it runs. Use the utilitech water sensor to alert you if the water rises above your float switch.

You could still track how often it runs with your google spreadsheet using an accelerometer. I don’t track every time it runs. But I use this app by Tim Slagle to alert me if the pump runs more often than I think it should.

I just stumped across a post where a guy built a water sensor by hacking a Monoprice Open / Close sensor. That may be the road that I have to go down and I cannot get the water sensor that I have to work.

I have made several of them and they work like a charm. In my case essentially just a long piece of speaker wire with the ends exposed about 1 inch and .5 inch apart. I didn’t bother with embedding in paper/felt/cloth. Kick on when there is conductivity, and instant off when not. Should handle your requirement of multiple on/off’s within a minute just fine.

As others suggested, log to a spreadsheet when on/off.

J