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I'd like to set up a few water leak sensors in/under my house to avoid the kinds of plumbers' bills that I got recently! I had been hoping somebody had built such a thing with 1-wire or I2C ready to use, and I'd just have to string some wires and write some code for the rpi, but no such luck.

I'm looking for ideas, blog posts, ... of people who have done this kind of thing before. This is a question about the hardware, not the software.

Paul Slocum
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Johannes Ernst
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I have built such a circuit in the past for some friend that had a small production plant and needed to keep track of water levels in a tank.

I don't have the drawings anymore, but the circuit was something like this one below (from http://www.electroschematics.com/9964/arduino-water-level-indicator-controller/). It's for an arduino and should work just fine on the Pi. enter image description here

I would place the transistor close to the measuring point to avoid interference from power cables in the house. If you only need 1 measuring point then use a pair of cables to wire it directly to the GPIO and read a high/low condition. Keep the tips of the cables in the air some 5mm (1/4") apart at the measuring height you want to detect, don't let them touch anything else.

kxtronic
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