The coffee pot thing was in reference to evaporation of water. Heat is one thing that increases evaporation rate. Coffee pot was not pumping enough water to keep some of the water from going to steam, which was why I ended up with some really strong coffee. Leave a coffee pot on for a while, even if it works good, the water will still evaporate, leaving you with some potentially, not so nice stuff.
We don't really care about the flavor of coffee at this point, just that things can get nasty due to heat.
Salt don't evaporate! So what I did was purchase an ultrasonic level sensor. Level Sensor It's repeatable to within 0.019", and that should give me a pretty decent rate of evaporation. I'll also have thermocouples that will measure ambient and water temperature. Analog input was another 280 bucks.
Sounds like a bit much, but I could potentially be away for several days at a time. Automation is a reasonable answer for me.
The reason I mentioned impractical, is it could get expensive to control things in a decent form.
Been looking at the Arduino stuff. Pretty reasonable for what it is. Pretty sure you can use this as the controller and beef it up for outputs with hardened devices.
