[Roy Bean] believed it was quite silly for the Milwaukee Makerspace to keep getting bottles of water for their water cooler. He rigged up a system that automatically fills the refrigerated reservoir in their water cooler. It’s a practical hack that likewise supplied an reason for him to discover about a couple of different sensors.
What you see above is the meat as well as potatoes of the hack. The well is where water from a bottle drains into the cooler. This has been covered with a sheet of acrylic to keep the drinking water clean. There is a copper pipe which has been plumbed into the tap water supply. The other two bits are redundant level sensors to make sure the water valve shuts off without overflowing. one of them is a capacitive proximity sensor, the other is a conductivity sensor hacked together using stainless steel hardware submerged in the pool.
If you’re anxious about the taste or odor of your tap water just add in a single or several stage under-counter filter system when plumbing in the water line. The filters are simple to discover as well as we’d bet they expense less than a contract with a bottled water company.
[Thanks Pete]