Pressure test success!

A rainy Sunday provided an opportunity for some father/son #watergeeking. We rigged up some bungy cords and fired up the garden hose to test the pressure sensor for 3 m of head.
With Max on the hose, everything got thoroughly wet but we managed to fill the vertical riser pipe and record the sensor reading to inform calibration.

With no water in the pipe, I observed a reading of 101, while with 3 m of water I recorded 343. This confirms the sensitivity and gives as a linear adjustment factor for pressure calculations.
While I'm waiting for the second sensor to arrive I'm going to start putting together the prototype rig which will have a few configurations on the outlet to allow testing of submerged and open air discharge scenarios.

I'm also dusting off some high school maths to solve the head/pressure relationship for the check valve. This is proving to be a good mental challenge!

Sense and sensitivity

Monday evening served as a great opportunity to solder up my fancy new pressure sensor and see if it cut the mustard for measuring the low heads expected.

This week's laboratory was my mum's kitchen sink (renos are full steam ahead at our house so no bath).

Initial results from the Adruino serial plotter on my laptop were very promising, and I got a resolution of about 10 mm which should be plenty to work out flows passing through the WaStop. Much better than the 250 mm I was getting with my other sensor!

Next step is to calibrate it properly with a longer pipe then start putting together my testing/demo setup. I found a very nice plywood pallet on the side of the road last week which should make a perfect base.

Whizz bang sensor has arrived

A yellow santa (Courierpost) arrived with a new sensor and cable from Element14.
Out of the box it looks great, with a great finish quality and some nice sealing on the cable. Having a datasheet is awesome too!
I'll get this wired up for some testing in the next few days.