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2020-06-16 8:38 pm
Hi Everyone.
A little background about my project.
I have an overhead water tank on the roof, it's located on the 3rd floor of the building (so not very easily accessible), and recently since the beginning of summer it's been emptying out very quickly, and I wanted to have some sort of quick indication on my cellphone about the current water level in the tank, along with some other useful information like.
a) Water overflow status, to stop water pump at the right time.
b) Water inflow status, to let me know,if motor is even pumping water or not.
How I am Solving it.
To handle this case, I have built a simple HC-SR04 sonar setup connected with NodeMCU to periodically update my Android app on the local network about the above described states of water. I am powering this entire setup with a 5v usb charger.
My Concerns.
Since I don't have much experience with electronics, I am a little skeptical about the probability of Lightning strike on this setup, since it will be at the very top of the roof.
Can someone please guide me through it, and how to install this setup safely. Thank you so much. 😊
2020-06-17 8:35 pm
The usual disclaimers that I'm not a professional lighting tamer and not responsible for any circumstances resulting from suggestions, here are some of my experiences. After many years working on telemetry equipment in the oil fields, you basically can't protect electronic equipment from direct lighting strikes economically. With a lot of engineering you can reduce probability of damage from the EMP of near strikes.
If there are no wires other than power leading into your house I would try to limit any wire outside of a grounded metal conduit and place a simple isolation device on your power feed to keep any spikes from feeding back into the house. You can do much more but keep in mind cost of protection, the likely hood that it will actually prevent damage and the replacement cost of what your protecting.
Even the EMP of a close strike can be 10s of thousands of volts. Your MCU can't handle much more that 3.5 volts. The best advice I can give is try to make sure your added circuitry doesn't cause damage to your house by allowing lighting a route in and keep your exposed circuitry inexpensive and easy to replace. Hope that helps 😊