Hello everyone,

This is my first instruct-able here. Everyday, we hear about saving water causes and how big the impact of wasting water on the humanity. Today, I would like to join this awareness wave from my stand as a geek!

Please note that if you're seeking code, detailed steps and/or some instructions on how to do the stuff below without bothering yourself scratching your mind little bit, then this is not the right instruct-able for you!

I believe that if you build it yourself, its easier for you to debug new problems when you're willing to upgrade this project sometime. Moreover, the internet is already overwhelmed with basic tutorials on how to connect shield with uControllers and such..

Lets begin!

Step 1: Whats Its All About!

Back in my home town, we didn't have water available all day long, so we used to have centralized water tanks per neighborhood or even water tank per home at the top of the building. Sometimes, the water pump of the water distributor, pumps water with a huge amount and large power that would make some problems with ballcock (depends on how far you're form the distribution center). This would lead us to the first problem:

A) Faulty ballcock: during an active water circle, this would allow huge amount of water to be wasted, and since the whole waste is on the roof top of tall buildings, you won't know about this waste until you check your bills at the end of the month $$$$$

Having the issue above is somehow human-being error free.. (you bet) .. another issue is .. water wasting! more about this in the coming section!

Step 2: Solving the Faulty Water Ballcock Issue

In order to overcome the issue with the faulty water ballcock, I grapped myself a:

-Controller, its a matter of preference, for this project I used an Arduino NANO

-Solenoid Valve

-RainDrop Module

-Siren

so in case the water level has increased above the ballcock level (detected by the raindrop module) the solenoid will close and the siren would start making noise so it would tell you "come and fix the issue!". I know this would affect your neighbors, but knowing that your ballcock is broken, this is an indicator that there is a good chance their ballcocks might be affected too!

I also added an on/off switch to turn of the siren in case you want to shut it off while you're fixing the faulty ballcock.

Step 3: The Issue With Water Usage

In my opinion, stopping wastage (in general) is about knowing when to stop or knowing your limit. Thus the idea of controlling your usage by presetting how much you want to use. Say you are a general manage of a factory, school headmaster or simply a home owner, you would have an estimation of how much your usage during a period of time.

A sample solution for this for a DIY/tech/geeky point of view is to go throw cycles, say an hour for each, if the water flow has increased above the estimation during that period of time the system would inform you!

I used the following parts for this:

- the same arduino NANO from before

- the same Siren

- water flow sensor

Step 4: To Wrap Up..

This project has many applicable areas to be use in. As part of my contribution in the water saving causes around the world, I built a simple demonstration for the idea and will present that to local multiplicity as well as getting a chance to win the Arduino contest with this instruct-able :)

Have a look at the video and let me know (accept my apologies for being nervous since this is my first trial)

Please leave a comment down here so we would help getting this thing better :)

Please Vote for this cause (in contests) if you see this is a good candidate :)