I would like to personally monitor how much water our house uses, but I do not have a water meter from the supply company. Our water pipes are mostly copper.
Is there any tech out there either off the shelf or homebrew which I could use to measure consumption? I would prefer not to have to cut into the pipes but if that’s the only option happy to consider.
UK Based.
Thank you
you would be lookg for magnetic flow meters. There are bunch of them, you’ll. need to find one that exposes measured data in usefull manner. not sure there is already devices with integrations (custom or not)
thank you for the pointer - any specific devices you’d recommend?
Look here: (dutch website)
video:
Thank you for the link - this appears to read data from a water meter, unfortunately I do not have a water meter so need to look at a water flow sensor I think
GitHub - nohn/watermeter: Reads analog water meters and provides a web service that returns the read value as decimal. and Home · jomjol/AI-on-the-edge-device Wiki · GitHub come to my mind.
Disclaimer: I’m maintainer of the first one.
not specifically, what money you can spend is also a parameter of course. There are more 'professional ’ devices that would have modbus comms available. NIce would be one that has an interface on TCP (modbus over TCP would be very nice ofcourse, but any json or text document type fetchable from the meter woudl be useful)
Opgeklemde doorstroomsensor | KEYENCE International Belgium(Nederlands). would be a IO-link device, which is not that easy to read out if there is no existing bus infra.
ultrasonic also option seems:
with nice interfaces
Interface
BACnet MS/TP, BACnet/IP, Modbus RTU, Modbus TCP, EtherNet/IP, BEACON/AquaCUE Connectivity
ow wait… 'not breaking your budget is in this case about 3000Dollars… 
possibly some stuff on aliexpress could help out. Most will require some tinkering on RS interfaces probably
I put together a cheap water meter for my yard irrigation system that works well. Since then I’ve purchased a second sensor to do the same thing for the whole house but haven’t installed it yet.
The ‘meter’ is just a hall effect pulse flow sensor, and the sensor is an ESP32 module that counts the pulses and sends it to HA. This was my first experience with ESP32 and ESPHome, so I think anyone could do it. You do need to cut the main water line and install the sensor, and you need to power the ESP32 at that location. I plan on using PEX pipe and connectors, which makes any plumbing job simple enough for a non professional, and that will allow it to be easily removed or changed out if the sensor ever fails.
This was the thread that got me started: ESPHome Water sensor
I started off with this sensor/meter package H2OPro and ended up switching out their meter with the ESP32 module.
You can get the flow sensors for under $10, and I bought 4 ESP32 modules for $25. Once calibrated it was very accurate. I set up some Utility Meter Helpers in HA to keep track of the irrigation water used daily, weekly, monthly and yearly.
UK based product, very nice, very expensive. Sonic Water meter and leak detector. Especially handy when you don’t have a meter from your water company. I would love to have it.
There is a company making zigbee water shutoff valve and an optional flow meter can be connected to it. The flow meter won’t work without the valve. So you need both installed and of course pipe work is involved. They are making a 3/4 and 1 inch pipe version as well as a 3/4 pex version.