"Steve W." wrote in message ...
vey wrote:
Steve W. wrote:
Looking for a way to activate a small lamp to show when a remote mounted
water pump is running. I know I have seen the method before but my dusty
brain cannot seem to find it. The pump is a 120volt unit mounted in a
remote pump house out of visual range or I would wire a light across the
pressure switch. I was thinking of something like an inductive coil
around the hot lead feeding a circuit that would power the light. No
problem working on the panel end. Ideas?



Maybe I am stupid, but couldn't you just wire a 120 lamp cord and bulb in
parallel with the pump? You would do this at the switch. When the
pressure switch closed, then the pump and the bulb would come on.

Or you could wire in after the controller box, if you have one.

But make sure that this really is a 120 pump. Most are 240 and then you
would wire one hot to one side of the bulb and neutral to the other side
of the bulb.


Not stupid and I could do that BUT The pump itself is almost 200 feet away
down over a bank in a pump house. I am hoping to be able to connect
something inside the house on the feed to the pump to tell me when it is
operating, rather than burying a lot more wire.

If I had a transformer here that could handle the 15 amps I would hook one
side of it into the hot side of the feed and use it to power a light since
current/voltage would only be flowing when the pump was on but that would
be a good sized transformer. I think my current course of action will be
to wrap a section of the hot side through a toroidal core with a larger
section of magnet wire and see what I get voltage wise. Kind of a
crossbreed current transformer.
--
Steve W.

You're fairly unlikely to get enough to be able to do much with on it's own,
but if you slung it across the inputs of an opamp, and smoothed the result
at the output, you'd have enough to drive a small relay to switch a low
power transmitter - like a WalMart baby alarm, as someone suggested
elsewhere in the thread.

Arfa