The Goal

The purpose of this blog is to document the progress of my project to track the solar warming of the swimming pool.

The solar panel is a very basic black plastic panel connected to the swimming pool filter circuit. So when the water is filtering, a portion of it is bypassed through the solar panel, warmed by the sun, and returned to the swimming pool.

I want to do this:

• measure and record the initial water temperature
• measure and record the water temperature after going through the solar panel
• visualize everything in the internet, and display graphs

Stretch targets:

• if the temperature after warming is lower than a set limit, close the warming circuit by operating an electrovalve with Arduino
  
• ability to change the temperature limit from the internet
  
• abilit to close the circuit manually from the internet
  
• record the weather temperature and wind speed, to track the cooling effect of wind and nights
• record the water flow with a flowmeter (need to find one that can be read from Arduino)
  
• build a sensor to measure water movement and record usage hours of pool, and eventually take an action on that
  

I will use an Arduino duemilanove to control everything. The Arduino will be connected to a Fonera wi-fi router via serial port. The temperature sensors will be 1-wire sensors DS18S20. The data will be logged to a remote mysql database.

The wind speed will eventually come from the AAG 1-wire weather station. The control page will be programmed with PHP and will run in the Fonera.