Water Heater TTC (Time To Cold Water)

Find out how long you can take a shower until you run out of hot water

Comment

Prize Categories

Best use of Edison Communication Innovation Championship Finalist

Inspiration

You're in your shower after a long day, and you notice that the shower is getting colder. So, you turn the shower knob to get the most hot water possible. Eventually, you start completely running out of hot water, and your shower is cold. Sadly, you'll have to end your shower. You'd like to know how much time you have until your shower starts to get cold, right?

For the environmentally friendly, you can finally find that roommate who has been using up all the hot water and sending your electrical and water bill through the roof! With a simple webpage, you can see the peak water heater usage for each part of the day.

The main inspiration in all this was hot water and the Internet of Things, so we combined the two to make a practical solution.

How it works

We have an Intel Edison with the Grove breakout board and sensor kit. This acts as the home module, and would be located in or near the shower (waterproofed, of course). This module is running in AP mode, acting as a wireless access point. A UDP server and the Johnny-Five node.js library are running to collect data, and to output information to the LCD screen in your shower. A serial-to-wifi device (ESP8266) and an I2C temperature sensor are connected to an ST Nucleo MBED board. This mbed setup is measuring the temperature of the water heater, and sending this data wirelessly via the serial wifi module with UDP to the UDP server on the home module. This in turn does calculations to find how much time of hot water is left based on the varying usage of the hot water, and the result is displayed on the home module LCD screen.

Challenges I ran into

-Calculating the change in temperature in the water heater. -Sending temperature data wirelessly from the shower and hot water heater to each other to display data on the LCD screens.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

-Figuring out how to calculate the rate of change of temperature (in the water heater), and the Time to Cold Water -Using a bus pirate to successfully scan the I2C address for the temperature sensors to grab data. -Accessing the ESP8266 via serial from the mbed board. -Getting the ESP8266 (Serial Wifi module) to connect to the Access Point. -Having the ESP8266 send temperature data to the home module.

What I learned

-Thermodynamics of water -I2C addressing -LCD interfacing -Learned how to use the Intel Edison, Nucleo MBed platforms. -ESP8266 Usage

What's next for Water Heater TTC (Time To Cold Water)

This is obviously a prototype setup, so we want to make this use more dedicated hardware rather than a lot of unnecessary hardware. The Internet of Things setup is using the home module (Edison) as the network access point, but in the future we would want to have this automatically connect to a home network for easier access. Also, the web interface could be improved to be more user friendly and show more human-readable statistics.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates