[allene222]

Just some clarification about my pumps. The large pump is indeed on a float switch and will operate independent of the monitor. The small pump is an auto pump that normally goes off every 2 1/2 minutes and senses when it is done pumping. I have modified the code so that the last thing that happens before sleep is the pump power is turned off so that if the software hangs, the pump will still operate in its normal auto mode. One reason to avoid having the pump always in auto mode is they fail after about 4 years. I am hoping that by only running it once a day that it will last longer. If the small pump does fail, the large one keeps the boat from sinking.

I am not sure if I specifically mentioned it in the article but this is a wood boat and it leaks. The pump will run about 25 seconds a day to remove the day's water. I have the sequence after running the engine because a hard sail can cause the leaking to increase until things swell back up.

There have also been several changes to make the monitor more robust since I wrote the article. One main one is that a lot of the sample code on the web for email monitoring has "while" loops. These need to have counters to exit if the WiFi is down for example.