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 $25. Once calibrated it was very accurate. I set up some Utility Meter Helpers in HA to keep track of the irrigation water used daily, weekly, monthly and yearly.
UK based product, very nice, very expensive. Sonic Water meter and leak detector. Especially handy when you don’t have a meter from your water company. I would love to have it.
There is a company making zigbee water shutoff valve and an optional flow meter can be connected to it. The flow meter won’t work without the valve. So you need both installed and of course pipe work is involved. They are making a 3/4 and 1 inch pipe version as well as a 3/4 pex version.
Any update guys ? Would be great to find a cheap way to know my consumption to automate it in case of a leak when away on vacation … so far a camera + old school water meter + that magic from git hub seems the most affordable but a bit too much of a hassle. It is so easy to measure your electricity usage these days. Would be great if there is a box where i can plug an ultrasonic sensor from aliExpress for 5$ and have it all nice in HA via wifi or zigbee or BT and etc… saw that ppl come up with a diy esp solution but that seems to be also too much of a hassle to start it all from scratch…
Cheap = that camera + old school meter = ‘hassle’
(it’s actually quite easy to do! I’m doing it now)
Expensive = ‘less hassle’
I would love to know your thoughts on this a year later. I am looking to do some water monitoring for my garden and this looks like a low cost way to get it done. I will need to learn all this stuff from step one so I am hoping that it still works well for you.
No issues with the H2OPro water meter for the yard/garden. I have it installed outside between my faucet and a 7 valve manifold. I designed it to sit above ground as opposed to most watering systems that sit below ground. In freezing weather even the professionally installed systems need to be drained. Before our first frost date I unscrew everything from the faucet and take it inside, and blow out the lines with compressed air. I’m using 1/2" poly for the distribution lines, so even if some water remains I don’t expect those lines to crack, and if they do they are easily patched. I’m using a 8 channel relay connected to the ESP32 to control the valves, and the Smart Irrigation integration to determine how much water to apply to each zone. I’ve got cards in HA that show the time each zone was last watered, how much water was used, and I’m using soil moisture sensors as a sanity check to keep an eye on moisture levels.
For the whole house meter I wasn’t thrilled with using a plastic meter valve that could crack. Also was concerned that using one of those smaller valves intended for a garden on the whole house would decrease the flow, so I went with a different pulse meter whole house meter that does need to be plumbed in. That meter combined with a Z-Wave Dome water shutoff valve and some leak sensors lets me shut off the house water if a faucet is left on for a long time, or if water starts running when no one is home and none of the yard irrigation valves is active.
Both of these valves have been extremely accurate. I’m using Utility Meter helpers in HA to track hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly water usage for both.
This ultrasonic meter might be useful to investigate - Reading a TUF-2000M Ultrasonic Flow Meter with an Arduino or ESP8266 – Dilettante
I’ve just purchased one https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805350677257.html from aliexpress, and I guess i’ll see how it goes! My meter is under a cover in my front lawn, so it would be pretty unfeasable to somehow power an ESP32 / ESP8266 out there to read the meter for me, and getting the data from my utility seems like it’s going to be fairly delayed, providing at best hourly resolution, and be a lot of work.
There seems to be at least one person who got this to work with ESPHome too: TUF-2000M Ultrasonic Water Flowmeter MODBUS integration - #6 by newnub
Did anyone try to integrate this water meter?
ORION Endpoint from Badger Meter Inc.
I got this from my utility company yesterday. It is installed next to the meter in an underground box about 15m from the house so I am not even sure if the low power(?) RF would be strong enough.
Based on the FCC report it transmits in spread spectrum in the range 904.9…924.5MHz
FCC report GIF2014W-OSE
