Water leaks control

Setup, Configuration and Use Beginners
1

I’m a real newbie. Sorry for that.

I would like to have a device that would be able to take short clips of the house water meter, that has a spinning wheel.

The purpose is to check remotely if there are leaks in the house’s plumbing.

Any low-price camera that could do that, Zigbee preferred, Z-wave accepted. Power is not a problem, could be battery operated or power line.

All suggestions and critics are welcome. Maybe there are better solutions to my problem. Those will be very welcome too.

Thanks a lot!

2

To my knowledge, there is no such thing as a camera that transmits the video over Zigbee or Zwave. Those that do support those protocols only support pan/tilt/zoom and alerts (e.g. motion) through. You’ll need wifi or wired for the video stream, at which point you may as well just do it all through through the network.

So look for wifi cameras. You can use the IPCamera binding to manage the capturing of the clips and show those in MainUI and do other stuff so look for cameras that are compatible with it. But if you want an automated alert, you’ll probably have to look outside of OH for the image processing.

3

I use this one. Transmits values via mqtt. Works very good.

Watermeter

4

I connected inductive sensor that bought from aliexpress for couple of euros to the GPIO of my raspberry Pi running the OpenHAB and I use MQTTany - GPIO and more over MQTT to get the data. Also works fine.

Because of the operating voltage of the inductive sensor is higher than what the GPIO can accept, optocoupler in between should be used and also >5V power supply to feed the sensor.

5

Thanks a lot, Rich. Good to have your info. Being new to all this, when I read that Zigbee transmission frequency is 2.4Gh I thought it could transmit video clips or snapshots.
Thanks again.

6

10E6 Thanks stefanbolle!
I followed the Watermeter link, and it seems to me is is exactly what I’m looking for.
Very kind of you.

7

Thanks a lot, Darko. Kind of you to help.

A couple of questions. Excuse me for being ignorant.

I’m assuming the inductive sensor should be placed near the meter spinning wheel, most likely on top of it, as the top is the only not metallic part of my water meter.
The sensor will send voltage readings related to the wheel rotation speed.
Is that right?

Could you please tell me the brand/model of the sensor?
As I am only concerned with leaks, all I need to know is if the wheel is spinning or not, so maybe I will not need the optocoupler.
Will I?

Thanks again,

8

Usually the utility water meters have a location where you can put a sensor, but that depends on the meter

No, the wheel on my meter does one rotation per liter so when the sensor detects the metal you wil receive a pulse which you will need to count. That is where MQTTany comes in.

No, the optocoupler is used to separate voltages and you will always need it if you want to connect the sensor to rPi.

Have a look at the following link. I have the same meter and sensor.

9

Thanks again Darko. Very kind of you.
I’ll do my homework with the info you have provided.
Regards.

(Attachment luisdereyna.vcf is missing)