I love it, but if you just want to water a tree the siphons work really really well.
Show HN: Watering my Christmas tree with ESPHome
21–30 of 45 posts
Re: Show HN: Watering my Christmas tree with ESPHome
#22I 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 thoughts exactly on using ESPHome. My familiarity with float switches is limited to boats. Any you would recommend for this application?
A condensate safety drain switch is appropriate here.
Something like this: https://www.supplyhouse.com/Beckett-Pumps-1502UR-Float-Safet...
or
https://www.supplyhouse.com/Little-Giant-599124-ACS-3-Auxili...
Re: Show HN: Watering my Christmas tree with ESPHome
#23Heard those moisture sensors rust. Anybody have insight into whether that’s true ?
Re: Show HN: Watering my Christmas tree with ESPHome
#24Heard those moisture sensors rust. Anybody have insight into whether that’s true ?
Re: Show HN: Watering my Christmas tree with ESPHome
#25I 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 thoughts exactly on using ESPHome. My familiarity with float switches is limited to boats. Any you would recommend for this application?
Something like this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007CZ6PD2
I just noticed that you're using a mains-powered pump, so don't splice its wires directly. Instead, insert the float switch on one of the wires between the QT Py and the relay.
Re: Show HN: Watering my Christmas tree with ESPHome
#26I 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.
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Re: Show HN: Watering my Christmas tree with ESPHome
#27Why choose a pump over a siphon?
because you can't program a siphon? a siphon isn't going to give you any data that you can then plot on a graph (if that's your kink). also, what kind of Show HN post would a siphon make? You'd just get a bunch of uninspired questions like this.
Re: Show HN: Watering my Christmas tree with ESPHome
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
> 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 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 usi…
Luckily trees' whole purpose in life is for their offspring to grow so we're doing them a favor.
Re: Show HN: Watering my Christmas tree with ESPHome
#29A lazier version for the rest of us would be measuring how much time it takes to replenish the water once a day, and then turn on the pump for that amount of time each day.
You can do this with a IFTTT routine and a smart plug.
Re: Show HN: Watering my Christmas tree with ESPHome
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
My thoughts exactly on using ESPHome. My familiarity with float switches is limited to boats. Any you would recommend for this application?
A condensate safety drain switch is appropriate here. Something like this: https://www.supplyhouse.com/Beckett-Pumps-1502UR-Float-Safet... or https://www.supplyhouse.com/Little-Giant-599124-ACS-3-Auxili...
Perfect. Thank you