OK, I thought I would share back with the community what I've got working. As of this morning all is going well with phase 1 of my (evil) plan.
I can now automate the flow of water to either the pond or the house, and have rules in place to make sure the house gets a good water supply while the water softener is running. I'm not yet monitoring the level of the pond, that will come later, but the ESP32 is doing it's job and sensing whether the pump is running and monitoring temperature. I also came across Quick Chart, which is VERY easy to use for charting basic data. Installing it was a bit of a head scratcher, but once in, it was very intuitive to use.
Here's my pump house (before cleaning up the wiring):
And the dashboard I quickly created:
Thank you very much for all the help, I'm really excited about evolving this, but this is miles ahead of where I was.
