Experimental wireles fill/waste device and need a little help with standard pool info

[setsailsoon]

Folks,

I'm hoping one of you familiar with standard pool design info can help me. I need to know if there's any reason why I can't add water to the pool with a supply line tied in upstream of the pump. This would be a very convenient place for my little experiment. Supply pressure is about 40 psi. If the pump is off when I add water will it try to flow back through the drain and do any damage? I'm guessing some will flow through the pump and some will flow back to the main pool drain (my usual suction for the pump).

Thanks.

Chris

 

[mknauss]

No damage I can think of pushing water back out the suction. Odd though. Also tying a pressurized non-potable water system into your house water system would be a real issue to me.

 

[Bama Rambler]

As MK said, no harm will be done. You really don't care if the water backs through the skimmer or suction, or gets drawn into the pump when it's running. You do need to make sure you have a vacuum break between the potable water and the fill. Depending on your municipality, you may need a double air gap in the line.

 

[Mutley]

As others said, your main problem will be feeding pool water back into your house supply should something go wrong. I would *think* it would be against most regulations even with the mandated back flow preventor that you need on all outside faucets.

 

[setsailsoon]

Folks,

Thanks for the responses, this is just what I needed. I will definitely use a redundant back-flow device with a way to test for this installation.

A little more detail. For some reason all pools built in my area near Stuart Florida are built with no over-flow for level control nor do they seem to have water addition. Owners have to get this capability added and it's expensive. So I'm going to add a valve for makeup water and drain at the pump pad. I already added the drain line quarter-turn valve and ran it to a French drain that I had installed a couple of years ago. We add water with a hose when needed. In our location we drain often and add fewer times about half the year also. I hate manual operation partly because Im lazy and partly because I'm kind of nerdy about home automation. So there has been a major breakthrough in miniature controllers for Internet of Things using a new processor called an ESP32. It's about 1/3 the cost of an arduino or Rasberry Pi with 100 times the processor power and has wifi/bluetooth plus a LOT of other features on board. I've done the bench scale version programming that will allow me to put up a simple html page on my home network that has a couple of buttons to open and close the valves for user selected times. I plan to install the drain automation first then once I get it working reliably I'll add the make up water valve. After this I'll install a battery-operated wifi level switch I'm also working on and add fully automatic operation mode.

Thanks again for your help and I'll keep you posted on this crazy idea that my wife is very skeptical about. She never liked my Arduino projects and the ESP isn't starting out with her support either.

Chris

 

[Mutley]

I’ve done a bit work with different ESP versions. It will work easily, but I’d recommend an on timer rather than on off switch. Ie turn it on from a web page, the ESP will turn on, then turn off after X minutes, rather than wait for the off command. If you want it on for more than the X time out, then simply hit the on again, or setup a times from a different computer. That way you have the best chance that it will always turn off if there is an issue like WiFi / Bluetooth drops. Since you’ll need an external power supply for the actual valve, you should also do a failsafe for that as well.