"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.

Don't know what your budget for this contraption is, but I think what you're
looking for is a current-operated switch, such as these:
--
Dave M
MasonDG44 at comcast dot net (Just substitute the appropriate characters in the
address)

"In theory, there isn't any difference between theory and practice. In
practice, there is." - Yogi Berra