After the slew of hurricanes and tropical storms that plagued the east coast this year, I think just about everyone became aware of 'flooding basement syndrome'. I certainly did. And, in accordance to Murphy's Law, the flooding MUST begin at 3am when you are soundly asleep in bed then continue to flood until you wake up the following morning to a brand new indoor pool. The second night is even better. You've learned your lesson and you're prepared for the worst. Unfortunately, all this results in is you standing there at 1am staring at a sump pump float for hours, performing your own scientific field test of the adage 'what goes up....must come down' and each time praying that it does.
Around hour 3 of this, it occurred to me that this is the 21st century!! I should just be alerted to the fact that my basement is flooding while I'm sound asleep by some device with the voice of Pierce Brosnan!!
As with most good ideas at 3am, I completely forgot about it. Then I recently saw this post on Make for a $25 water detector which reminded me. I thought I'd take my own spin at a simplified method. So here it is.....might not be a soothing voice to awake you (yet), but it will definitely get the job done...
What you'll need
- A battery operated smoke detector ($7)
- a large PVC coupler ($6)
- a large sponge ($1)
- A SPST switch ($1)
- wire
- a soldering gun
- glue
How it works
It's pretty simple and should only take you a good 30 minutes to put together. Basically, your highjacking the 'test button' that's present on any smoke alarm by attaching to leads to the PCB that go down into a sponge that's at ground level. When water saturates the sponge it completes the circuit causing the alarm to sound (and yes, the smoke detector still works too...as I quickly found out while soldering).
(see the rest after the break)
