Low-cost sump pump monitoring for condition-based maintenance

This work presents the development of a low-cost monitoring system for assessing the operating condition of wastewater and rainwater pumping systems using motor current signature analysis. The proposed system leverages open-source hardware and firmware, ensuring accessibility, interoperability, and replicability across diverse urban water infrastructures. It has been successfully deployed and validated in real sewage and stormwater sump environments, demonstrating robustness under harsh and variable field conditions. The architecture is designed with flexibility in mind, supporting both local and cloud-based deployments, thus enabling integration with advanced data analytics platforms. A remote diagnostics and alerting mechanism is incorporated to provide real-time food detection capabilities, improving emergency response during extreme weather events. By relying solely on non-invasive current measurements, the proposed approach effectively identifies anomalies associated with clogging in submersible pumps, providing a scalable and economically viable solution for condition monitoring within urban water systems.