Checking for automating water topoff
You have a lot of comments that are completely unnecessary, they are not needed.

int pumpPowerState = 0; //turns pump on and opens the ball valve to the laminator


The name of the variable tells me what this is and what it needs to do.  pumpPowerState that tells me the pump is either off or on and the assignment tells me we are using a 0 or a 1 to determine the on/off state of the device being controlled.

also the comments before and after the blocks are rather redundant as well, most of your blocks of code that you comment before and after are obvious what they are


///START set pins mode  ///



then there is your comment before the code inside the loop.


//// START FILL LAMINATOR FROM 70GALLON RES ///



This tells me that you should have a function that you call inside the loop, something like this

void FillLaminator() {
    startButtonState = digitalRead(startButton);
    if (startButtonState == HIGH) {
        while (checkFloat() &gt;= 2) {
            digitalWrite(pumpPower, HIGH);
        }
    }
    digitalWrite(pumpPower, LOW);
}


And while we are at it:

void FillWaterBucket() {
    startBucketState = digitalRead(startBucket);
    while (startButtonState == HIGH) {
        digitalWrite(pumpBucketValve, HIGH); //turn ball valve to on
    }
    digitalWrite(pumpBucketValve, LOW); //turn ball valve to off
}


Then you call it like this inside of the loop

void loop() {
    FillLaminator();
    FillWaterBucket();
}




Please indent the code inside of brackets so that you can tell the scope more easily. 

Do this:

void setup() {

    pinMode(floatSwitch1, INPUT);
    pinMode(floatSwitch2, INPUT);
    pinMode(floatSwitch3, INPUT);
    pinMode(pumpPower, OUTPUT);
    pinMode(pumpBucketValve, OUTPUT);
    pinMode(startButton, INPUT);
    pinMode(startBucket, INPUT);
}


instead of this:


void setup() {

pinMode(floatSwitch1, INPUT);
pinMode(floatSwitch2, INPUT);
pinMode(floatSwitch3, INPUT);
pinMode(pumpPower, OUTPUT);
pinMode(pumpBucketValve, OUTPUT);
pinMode(startButton, INPUT);
pinMode(startBucket, INPUT);
}



that should be a good start to writing cleaner Arduino code.