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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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Home assistant cheap pool sensor? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago by Fenixin@sh.itjust.works to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world

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Hello!

I moving to a new home with a small pool and I was thinking of buying a pool sensor.

Right now I'm searching for something simple like temperature but would be nice to have ph and others.

I'd like it to be local, no cloud, and right now something cheap, I love DIY stuff.

So, any recommendations? Any experiences with these kind of sensors? My searches lead to pretty expensive stuff that can measure all the pool parameters and cloud based.

Thanks for reading!

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[–] Ambrotos@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I know you said "cheap", and this isn't exactly that... but I thought I'd mention it as an option anyway. I went with the Atlas Scientific pool kit when automating my pool. It gives me pH, Temp, and ORP. They also have a dosing pump if you want to automate chemicals. It's based on an Adafruit ESP8266, so you can flash esphome on it, making integration with Home Assistant dead simple. https://atlas-scientific.com/kits/wi-fi-pool-kit/

You can go the DIY route for temperature with a $5 ESP8266 off Amazon and a $1 thermistor, but I don't think there are similarly cheap options for pH and ORP.

[–] Fenixin@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That looks amazing. But it's out of my budget right now. Thanks for the suggestion!

I've been thinking about the DIY route for some time but creating a water and weather proof enclosure it's not easy.

[–] Ambrotos@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

I don't think you need to stress too much about weatherproofing your DIY enclosure. You can get "weatherproof" boxes off Amazon for ~$20, and as long as you mount it somewhere out of direct exposure (e.g. near your pool controller under an eave) you'll be fine. For example, I built an irrigation control valve for an unrelated project into one of these boxes and mounted it to the back of my garden shed. It even comes with 2 cable glands. https://a.co/d/j7hkyDX

Then you can just run a cable over to a section of your pool's PVC piping (probably just after your pump), drill a small 1/4" hole and stick a thermistor into the flow. Something like this is designed for exactly this purpose: https://a.co/d/994WUHf It's even got an o-ring to seal the hole, you just hold it onto the pipe with a cable tie. Whether you get a Pentair-branded temp sensor or not, they're mostly all 10kOhm thermistors, which you can easily add to ESPHome as an NTC sensor: https://esphome.io/components/sensor/ntc.html

Hope that helps. I'm also a big fan of DIY :)