Monitoring water usage, any suggestions?

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  • PaulB
    Automated Home Sr Member
    • Sep 2015
    • 60

    Monitoring water usage, any suggestions?

    Hi

    I'm looking at possible (inexpensive) ways to monitor realtime, or as close to realtime, water usage as possible, but so far the cheapest solutions seem to be £300+ devices which don't seem to offer open access to either an API or way to scrape the data & ingest it into a time-series database.

    We do have a 'smart' water meter fitted, but I use the term 'smart' extremely loosely. It's a Diehl iZAR RC i W, but this was fitted by the water company & as such, I have no access to any data from it other than a 'monthly' summary 12 months down the line when they read the meter. Also, if I was to continuously poll the meter (if that was even possible) the built in battery would soon run out.

    As for inexpensive, the £300+ solutions I've seen are things like Flo, Fluid, Belkin Phyn, all mostly marketed in the states, but are ridiculously expensive!

    However, one idea is to fit a secondary meter within the property, which has a pule rate of 1 pulse/litre. Looking at it, something like this may be suitable:



    I could then hook up an Arduino which would record the pulses & feed back consumption to a time series db (Influxdb in my case) which would give me pretty reliable visibility.

    I've seen a few online pages pointing to this solution, but just wondering if anyone on here has done something similar?

    Cheers
  • toscal
    Moderator
    • Oct 2005
    • 2061

    #2
    There is a guy on ebay Spain selling these for just over 6 euros.

    The English translation is : The YF-S402 is a flow sensor which is made up of a plastic body, a water rotor and a Hall effect sensor. The design and operation of this type of sensor is simple. By using a sensor with vanes or blades to measure the amount of liquid that has moved through it. The blades have a small magnet and there is a Hall effect magnetic sensor that registers each turn of the blades, this generates output impulses at a speed proportional to the flow velocity. The arrow indicates the direction of flow. That is, the direction in which the water passes must be from left to right. By counting the pulses of the sensor output, you can easily follow the movement of the fluid: each pulse is approximately 2.25 milliliters. Note that this is not an accuracy sensor, and the pulse frequency varies a bit depending on the flow velocity, fluid pressure and sensor orientation. Careful calibration will be required if more than 10% accuracy is required. However, it is a very good product for basic tasks. This sensor is ideal for use in water conservation systems, storage tanks, domestic water recycling applications, irrigation systems and much more.

    There are quite a few on ebay Spain.
    A quick google of YF-S402 might give you other places you can buy it.
    IF YOU CAN'T FIX IT WITH A HAMMER, YOU'VE GOT AN ELECTRICAL PROBLEM.
    Renovation Spain Blog

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