Winter is coming. It is time to make preparations. If you live in a colder climate, you need to be concerned about the possibility of your pipes freezing. There are a lot of preventive measures that you can take, such as insulating your pipes and leaving the water dripping. But for a little extra peace of mind, I designed a simple alarm that will notify me if the pipes are getting too cold and are in danger of freezing.
Projects from Make: Magazine
Use Arduino to Avoid Frozen Plumbing This Winter
- Like
- Digg
- Del
- Tumblr
- VKontakte
- Flattr
- Buffer
- Love This
- Odnoklassniki
- Meneame
- Blogger
- Amazon
- Yahoo Mail
- Gmail
- AOL
- Newsvine
- HackerNews
- Evernote
- MySpace
- Mail.ru
- Viadeo
- Line
- Comments
- Yummly
- SMS
- Viber
- Telegram
- Subscribe
- Skype
- Facebook Messenger
- Kakao
- LiveJournal
- Yammer
- Edgar
- Fintel
- Mix
- Instapaper
- Copy Link
Steps
Advertisement
Step #1: Construct the Temperature Sensor
- The temperature sensor is made by connecting a thermistor (temperature-dependent resistor) and a fixed resistor in series. These two resistors form a voltage divider. As the temperature changes, so does the resistance of the thermistor. This causes the voltage between the two resistors to change, which can be measured by a microcontroller such as an Arduino.
- Connect one lead of the fixed resistor to the GND pin on the Arduino. Then connect the other lead to an analog input pin. Connect one lead of the thermistor to the 5V pin. Then connect the other lead of the thermistor to the same analog input pin. You can now use the AnalogRead function to measure the voltage changes.
- In order to insert the thermistor into the wall were the pipes are, I connected the thermistor with a pair of long jumper wires.