Tinkerer

With more free time on my hands these days, I've been finding it easier to pick up odd projects here and there and actually get them finished. Last week I ran a water line to the refrigerator so the in-door ice/water dispenser will actually work. The details were a little tricky, but after battling with it for a day I managed to get everything sorted out and it's been working fine ever since.

Perhaps a bit drunk on my success, I started thinking about the koi pond. Frankly, it's way over capacity in terms of the number of fish it has right now. It only took a few months for it to go from practically spotless back to green and opaque. Now, I could always say goodbye to some of the fish... but they're all so pretty, and sort of an interesting visual study of genetic inheritance. And I could get another new filter that won't do much good, and scrub the hell out of the pond, but it'll just get nasty again.

So instead of taking either of those options, I found some plans online to build a large scale bio-filter from fairly simple parts. Essentially, a pump drives water out of the pond and into a large receptacle (i.e. a 35-gallon trash can) which acts as a reservoir of filthy sludge, and then the clean(er) water rises to the top and makes its way back to the pond. I had one false start when the water outlet couldn't keep up with the pump I was using so I had to replace it with a pipe twice the size. Since then it seems to be balancing out just fine.

I'm slightly terrified, though, because an imbalance in the inflow/outflow translates to pond water pouring out onto the floor in the shed. It's a concrete floor so it's not the end of the world, but what really scares me is not noticing it happening or being out of town and coming back to find a drained pond and a bunch of dead koi.

I've been trying to come up with an excuse to play around with an Arduino for a while now. I'm no electrical engineer but I remember a lot of the basics, and I think for what I'm trying to accomplish I could sort out the details. In fact, I already found a concept design for something that can do what I want.

The rig would be built into the filter. It would sense the water level in the basin and from that, be able to determine whether everything is hunky dory or if things are about to go horribly wrong. And since I can build the software to work any way I need, I'm thinking that it can be creative.

If the water gets to the "hrm, something might be wrong" level, it can turn off the pump for a minute or two and then back on. It'll have an internal count of how many times it's done that... so if it repeats more than a few times, it can assume there's something clogged up and just shut the pump off until help arrives. And if the water reaches the, "Everyone in the ark, quick!" level, it can shut the works off too.

And if that's really successful, then I might try my hand at rigging a wireless transmitter into it and having the computer inside the house keep tabs on the water level. And then it can send push alerts to my iPhone to let me know when anything wonky happens. So when I'm in Maine or what have you, and completely unable to do anything about it, it can scare the shit out of me by saying, "FLOOD! FLOOD!"