I had a situation where my primary sump pump failed in the past few weeks. Fortunately I have a backup pump so I didn't get any flooding. It occurred to me not knowing the primary pump failed is a serious gap.
The failure mode of these pumps is often a short circuit in the motor windings. This causes the breaker to trip. Power lost.
So I put a Zooz ZEN38 into the same outlet as the sump pump. The ZAC38 has a battery so it will report its status even if power to it is lost.
I wrote a couple rules and added an alert tile to one of my dashboards. Now I get alerted if this occurs and I can choose to act on it or at the very least watch (I have an IP camera on the sump pit) the backup to ensure it's keeping up.
I picked another approach. My sump pump cycles pretty regularly regardless of season. I had been using a Zooz Zen15 to monitor power set to auto-on in the event of power loss. For some reason after several years of perfect performance it failed to come back on. Fortunately I caught it. I now use a vibration sensor placed on the sump discharge pipe. Always works, tracks my pump and can not interrupt power. There are notifications if it doesn't cycle as expected as well as a battery powered back-up.
I installed 2 float switches in my sump bucket, one just above my primary pump and the second just above the secondary. This way I can monitor them if one fails. These are hooked up to the Aeotec Water sensor 6 which has 2 inputs but any contact sensor will work like the Zen16/17.
