Wanted to share my current frustration, the thoughts that I’m currently staying awake for… a Home Assistant Automation and reporting scripts… what else
Next week I will be receiving my watermeter so I can monitor the global water usage of my house. Just like my electricity meter (using youless meter); all my historical data is stored in my influxDB (long-term) while short term (2 days purge) is stored in mariadb. I report my electricity using Grafana into my homeassistant.
This is just side-information, let’s go back to my challenge.
After receiving the watermeterkit, I would like to record the water usage for my family. 4 kids & 2 adults (+1 dog, but no way he is going to use my shower ;-))
I would like to measure the toilet water consumption (that will work), but also the water consumption of the showers. We have a double shower, so it is possible that 2 people are showering together at the same time (me + wife) or two kids at the same time
Now here comes my question : I would like to report WATER USAGE per shower user in my house. Kids are always playing around in the shower, so I want to measure how much water (and cost ;-)) the use in the bathroom.
First of all:
how can I detect that the shower is running ? When people are in the bathroom (I use motion) I can somehow start measuring if the water will be flooding or not ? I also have a humidity sensor, but the humidity will probably raise once the shower has been on for several minutes…
how can I detect WHO is showering and put a ‘timestamp’ of ‘ID stamp’ on the start of the measurement ?
→ I’ve been thinking about Bayesian sensors to work on the predictability → 2 of the 4 kids shower immediate after soccer and basket training, … wife showers morning OR evening, I always shower BEFORE bedtime, etc etc… but also : the kids and wife are using their cellphone in the bathroom to play songs on my sonos :
→ can I identify WHO is playing ? Or maybe look the played song to see in who’s favorites it is ?
→ should I track the RX or RSSI strenght to see who’s closest to the bathroom with their cellphone or iPAd ???
→ Maybe the easiast way is to have a NFC tag that enables to play on the sonos but also identifies who’s in the bathroom (but that needs some discipline, … don’t know about that)
You feel me ? This is what keeps me awaka at night… very nice challenge, but I need to come up with an answer
Got ideas ? Hints ? Wanna brainstorm ? Let me know !
Just mount a electric valve to each warm water supply pipe and control that with HA.
Motion sensor on → warm water valve open → timer 15 min → warm water valve close → 15 min timer denying reactivation.
A button accessible only by adults to bypass the reactivation time, if someone has to use the shower directly after the kids.
Like this, after 15 minutes only cold water is coming out of the shower. They will learn very fast to use that time efficiently
Much easier, than very complicated measuring…
So you see, where I,m going? Do not make your life difficult with this kind of worry, EDUCATE the kids to do, what you want. If they are educated good, you don’t need to do any technical solutions.
But, I know, how hard that can be. I’ve automated something like this also for our pubertal being.
Window open when outside cold → message on his mobile to remind closing it again → repeat that every 10 minutes.
After one month, he is closing the window him self and never forgets
Q: What differentiates a flushed toilet and a shower in progress?
A: From the central water meter’s perspective, the duration of water consumption and, to a lesser extent, flow rate. However, once the washing machine, dishwasher, and/or gardening hose enter the picture, all bets are off.
Q: What is the most reliable, convenient, and transparent way of determining who is in the bathroom, especially in the shower?
A: Nothing, unless you intend to microchip your family members. Motion detectors can report presence but not identification. If family members need to bring their phone to take a shower that’s not something that would be acceptable in my household but I can’t comment on your family’s choices.
Without sensors that can provide accurate reliable information regarding which device is consuming water and who is where (precisely) you will be relying on heuristics to infer the desired parameters.
Given the paucity of accurate reported information, you’re left with a system that does no better than make an educated guess about who and what is consuming water. That wouldn’t meet my expectations but if you’re satisfied with that level of performance, all I can offer is a link to this tutorial for the Bayesian Sensor integration:
If you have a small house with limited faucets/bathrooms/laundry, you may be able to figure it out. There are products like Flume that try and do that, but none of these work that well if you have larger homes with lots of parallel water use going on (washers, irrigation, bathroom, icemakers), etc… Still, it’s useful for looking at background flow in the middle of the night when everyone is asleep and see if you have a leak somewhere, and to shut off water in an automated way.
I want to do a bit the same thing, tell the user of the shower how much water he has consumed.
For my part, I am thinking of using the echo dot in the bathroom to detect the start of the shower with the function integrated into the echo dot for sound detection.
did you complete your challenge?
