Looking to monitor circuit on/off and accumulated times

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I believe I have a water leak between the well & the house. After watching pump cycle for a week, no indication of the leak has become apparent along the water line route.

I don’t live in the house full time so would like to be able to chart the number of times the pump cycles and the total “on” time per hour or per interval.

I was hoping that PR28-17_20A connected to a Rasberry Pi might work but question resistive load vs inductive load (pump motor)? I might even be able to figure out contact closure if I could tap into the pressure switch contacts but don’t know which components would be most appropriate.

Thanks for your help and suggestions.

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You have at-least 3 Choices:

  • Install CT to measure & graph the AMPs

  • Install Water Pressure Sensor to measure & graph Tank Pressure

  • Monitor the existing pump contactor for On/Off events (Cycles)

Is your existing pressure switch operating on 120V ?

The quickest way to get started is to rig-up a 120VAC to 5VDC power supply ( wall wart ) to one wire from the Pump. When the Pump is running, you have a 5VDC Output to use for the MCU you select.

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CT = ? Don't need to monitor pressure, although, suppose that's an option. Didn't really want to get into the liquid side also, had enough of un-wanted water. Yes, wanted monitor on/off

No, pump circuit is 240v.

If I grok the walwart idea, what items here at ncd.io might apply?
MCU = ?

Thanks for getting back on the topic, regrets I’m so neophyte to the topic and taxonomy.

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Hi @nleistad

A CT is a current transducer. It’s a sensor device used to read amperage being drawn on a circuit. That may be more than you need if you just want to know if the pump is on or off.

I like @rfontaine’s suggestion here to use a wall wart power supply to monitor if the pump is on or off.

Is your 240VAC 3 wire or 4 wire? If it’s 3 wire(two hots and a neutral) then you can still do as @rfontaine suggested and power a 120VAC to 5VDC or 12VDC power supply from one hot leg and the neutral. You should have 120VAC when measured across one hot leg and the neutral. If monitoring when the pump turns on is all you plan to do then probably the simplest/cheapest setup would be this board with a Particle Photon WiFI module installed:


Basically what you will do is use the 5VDC or 12VDC wall wart power supply to power up this board which will power up the Photon module installed in it. The Photon can be programmed to just publish an event when it wakes up notifying you that the pump is running. This however would not tell you when the pump went off without some rather intensive programming with timers and flags.

If you want to monitor the on and off times for the pump then you will want to connect a 5VDC wall wart to the pump system and then connect the 5VDC output of that supply to one of the ADC inputs on this board:


This board will also need a Photon module installed, it will also need a continuous power supply source(12VDC nominal). Since it is powered up all the time it can monitor when the pump kicks on, and when it kicks off and publish events for both. That can be logged to cloud software and you should be able to accomplish what you need.

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