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I hope there will be an effort to collect and replant Christmas trees, as the cultural practice of cutting down tree and letting them die slowly in front of us (just for our seasonal enjoyment!) strikes me as barbaric.
When controlling physical systems I try to limit the damage they can do with simple interlocks. For instance, the relay I added to control my central heat is in series with a conventional thermostat which is set for a few degrees above pleasant.
Likewise, you can splice a float switch in line with the pump's power cable, positioned so it will cut off power if the water level nears the top of the tree stand. This will prevent the flood when the software decides to rebel against you.
I built something like this but found that the electric arduino water sensor quickly became corroded after a week and a half and ended up replacing it with a float switch.
The tech is interesting, but what I like even more is that it may increase the chances of survival of the tree if the root ball hasn't been cut! I hope there will be an effort to collect and replant Christmas trees, as the cultural practice of cutting down tree and letting them die slowly in front of us (just for our seasonal enjoyment!) strikes me as barbaric.
I love this. Great work! I’ve thought about doing the same thing for years. But in my experience, those cheap capacitive sensors fail quickly. Might be worse when the water gets all sappy or filled with needles. What sort of fail safe do you have for when the sensor becomes inaccurate?
Thanks! No fail-safe besides the limit of only running the pump for 10 seconds at a time. I will continue to keep an eye on the data being pumped to Home Assistant and look to add a condition if/when the sensor fails.
Part of the joy of process control is thinking about all of the ways that things can fail. Adding to your woes...
Relays can fail, and it's actually a common failure mode for them to get stuck in the "closed" position, meaning that your pump runs forever. I learned this the hard way controlling heaters.
Amusing anecdote: I wanted to set something up to water my tree while my family was on a trip, and I ended up with a large pail of water next to the tree and a siphon tube running between them. Totally passive.
The tech is interesting, but what I like even more is that it may increase the chances of survival of the tree if the root ball hasn't been cut! I hope there will be an effort to collect and replant Christmas trees, as the cultural practice of cutting down tree and letting them die slowly in front of us (just for our seasonal enjoyment!) strikes me as barbaric.
I built something like this but found that the electric arduino water sensor quickly became corroded after a week and a half and ended up replacing it with a float switch.
They have capacitive moisture sensors too
The tech is interesting, but what I like even more is that it may increase the chances of survival of the tree if the root ball hasn't been cut! I hope there will be an effort to collect and replant Christmas trees, as the cultural practice of cutting down tree and letting them die slowly in front of us (just for our seasonal enjoyment!) strikes me as barbaric.
The trees are planted and farmed specifically to be Christmas trees. If nobody bought them, they wouldn’t be planted in the first place, so the act of cutting down then disposing of a Christmas tree has no net impact to the overall tree population (barring the small amount of Clark Griswolds out there who get their tree from a forest somewhere rather than a Christmas tree farm).
From a carbon capture perspective, you could argue planting, cutting then burying trees is a net positive - but cutting is killing.
From a moral perspective, financially helping an industry based on planting and cutting trees while not using them for shelter (wood is used in housing) or even heat (in a stove or a fireplace) strikes me as barbaric, because it's the purposeless killing of a living creature.
Killing and eating animals (if not vegan) or plants (if vegan) is necessary as we can't opt out of food (but maybe there will be a fully synthetic replacement someday)
Yet I can opt out of killing trees for ornamental purposes - and this tech may help other people save trees, if they can't opt out of having a live Christmas tree, say for cultural or familial reasons (tradition, etc)
I love ESPHome. The declarative language makes it fun and easy to do so many little tasks like this. Used with Home Assistant it makes it easy to create graphs of everything. Do I NEED to know how much water my tree consumes? No, but I like seeing it anyway! When controlling physical systems I try to limit the damage they can do with simple interlocks. For instance, the relay I added to control my central heat is in…
My familiarity with float switches is limited to boats. Any you would recommend for this application?