Water Meter?

Hardware Home Automation
27

One of the overall goals of our project is to use readily available components, and these cheap Chinese flow meters are everywhere on ebay. I will be installing a complete setup soon to get some real-world values and test reliability and durability of the “Made in Shenzen” hardware.

As for the temp sensor, I specifically ordered a flow meter with the temp sensor. I live in a cold climate and temperature is possibly even more important than leak detection for my application. This becomes even more important after stopping the flow.
For instance, if this shutoff is triggered from a leak detection, it will then stop the main supply to the house. Then, the water line between my well pump and the shutoff valve would be at risk of freezing (moving water doesn’t freeze…at least not at these temps). For this I plan to also implement a switched heat tape to keep the water trapped in the pipe from freezing and bursting my supply line. This will be a future addition, and is outside the scope of this current project.

28

dijit:

Have you had any additional movement on this project? I was just thinking about this the other day as I’m going to have to replace my water heater in the foreseeable future and might install additional items at that time.

Just wondering …

29

This definitely has me interested as well, especially knowing and possibly being able to control flow rate (pressure) of the water. We live in an area with pretty high pressure and constant water “hammer” when our appliances run, even with some strategically place water hammer arrestors.

So any further progress with the project?

30

Yes. Sorry for being MIA. Lots of projects in the works, and I was held up by delays in order processing and shipping on parts, apparently due to “Spring Festival/Golden Week”. I guess the week turned into months! This is another reason I would like to secure an inventory of parts, namely the electronic valves, to be able to offer for sale to others.

If anyone knows of a US supplier (not reseller) of motorized ball valves, I would be very interested.

I will post a full writeup of the current status of this project as soon as I can, but in the mean time, here is my advice based on our testing:

Definitely use a motorized ball valve for this application. All other valve types are failure prone or otherwise have unreliable results.

If hard wiring is not an option (ie use gpio on raspberry pi), you need to find a very reliable communication method to the valve, such as arduino or other dev board with wifi, ethernet, etc. Our testing has shown that the valve itself operates like a champ, but the bugs are always in communication between valve and device running openhab.

So far our solution uses a NodeMCU, replacing firmware with Arduino IDE based code. The temp and flow sensors are polled with the existing arduino code, and the valve control is essentially an openhab switch through the NodeMCU.

The charging circuit is surprisingly good using the micro-hydro generator, and allows for everything to be self contained and “wireless”. (Ie, no wires outside of waterproof enclosure.

Again,I will post detailed writeup and photos ASAP.

Sorry for the hiatus, and thanks for being patient with me.

31

I use a SDR on a pi, and a program called rtlamr which wirelessly gets water readings directly from my utility meter.

I send the readings into openhab via mqtt because the pi is closer to the water meter to get maximum number of readings.

Works great because with grafana you can use annotations such as identifying showers, laundry, turning on irrigation shutoff right on your dashboard for usage.

If you find your water meter is compatible with rtlamr, let me know, I’d be happy to share my docker images or scripts which get the info into openhab.

32

To clarify, our current setup does not allow for pressure control or partial opening of the valve. We have a valve that has 2 settings: fully open or fully closed.

I suppose that this could be further expanded with a pressure sensor and valve that can be incrementally opened, but we have a lot of work to do on this version before we can tackle those options.

33

Excellent. This one one of my first thoughts on how to get the data for water usage, however I also wanted a control valve and the ability to use this for smaller applications such as closed loop water systems.

Just thinking out loud here, but if I could combine my Brewtroller with openhab, I would be one very happy guy!!

34

This really is awesome … (and sorry for my hiatus as well). I look very forward to seeing what you have come up with. I’m really impressed that the “Micro-Hydro generator” is working as well as you say … but when you think about it, at least in an ‘active’ household … it would get a lot of opportunity to charge things. In a vacation home … there would probably have to be an external charging option.

Anyway … design on mate!

35

http://www.valworx.com/ sells motorized ball values. These are industrial quality and very well made. You can get the ball valve and actuator separately if needed. The actuator mounts to an ISO ball valve.

Or get the Zwave valve that Homeseer is selling: Z-Wave Water Shut-Off Valves | HomeSeer

If this is for potable water, make sure you get a lead free valve. There are cheaper valves on ebay and Amazon but I would be wary of the unspecified valve material.

36

Ok, here are the current issues/Updates:

  1. The output of the mico hydo generator is good, however the plastic housing, as feared, developed a leak in a matter of days. It is likely there was already a small crack which grew larger under pressure. The symptoms were lessened with the application of plumber’s putty (instead of pipe tape), however a small drip persists. I believe the only resolution to this would be a metal body, but that product does not yet exist, and we do not have the equipment to fabricate one. At this stage, the generator would be optional as @Ctrl-G suggested. Unfortunately this means we cannot have a fully enclosed and “wireless” unit. We are ordering from other vendors and different variations of this generator to continue testing.

  2. While changing the calibration factor increased accuracy, we are still having a calibration issue. The accuracy of the meter is off and we cannot narrow down the cause. @KjetilA, have you had any luck with your G3/4 valves? Manufacturer support is non-existent and most sample code currently online is designed for the G1/2 valves

  3. Again, the motorized ball valve is the most stable component of this project. It is reliable, and easy to setup in Openhab. I will post the simple code snippets to easily get one of these up an running.

3 Likes
37

Looking forward to see your results! :slight_smile:

1 Like
38

I started researching water metering a few years ago but I opened the question again as my water company will replace my meter…and should close this question soon:)

  1. They will eventually install attachment that transmit RF signal at 868Mhz with Prios protocol. Could not find much data how to read it. Anyone with a similar device? It does have hall element but I can not do my own reading with the TF device there too. Using dialEye there will be hard as it is in a dark hole outside my house.

  2. I bought this cheap meter for a test. It was easier to calibrate (have some Arduino sketch around) https://www.aliexpress.com/item/OKD-HZ43WA-Hall-flow-sensor-3-4/761954312.html

I am not sure if it will last long if I use it in a real-world scenario. The propellers inside are plastic. However, I plan to put whole house water filter before the meter so it will last longer.

  1. The third option is to use old but unused water meter with dials as a second meter. I can place it inside my house and control the environment (light) and use dialEye. It has a dial with one rotation per 10 L so most likely I will get 1L precision.
39

I have to apologize to all on this thread (at least since I hijacked it). In all honesty and full disclosure, part of the reason for the long delays between posts is that we ran into problems with this setup, and have not been able to resolve them. The biggest issue is the flow meter itself, which has had reliability issues. The motorized ball valve portion of this setup has been very reliable, but the flow rate is the more important function. I have ordered a new flow meter from another supplier and we are completely re-vamping this project. The other thing that took away from this project is a completely different project: a solar charge controller project, which I will be posting about separately. I have been working to build a charge controller that is easily integrated with openhab. I’m also working on a binding for that one. I hope to complete that and get back to the water flow meter and shutoff device.

40

I have a similar flow meter. There is a nonproportional relation between water flow and the number of pulses. Seems like, when the flow is low there is an amount of “uncounted” water.

My test: There is a valve on the pipe that fills the water tank for flushing the toilet. Each press gives almost the same amount of pulses (valve opened to maximum, pulse count across multiple time slots till comes back to 0). When I close the valve (like 40%) I get fewer pulses per flush. On very low flow there are even fewer pulses. It is hard to fix this.

I did 15L bucket test with similar findings. 380 pulses are around 1L. It does provide nice graphs anyway :slight_smile:

1 Like
41

I was wondering if you had seen any progress on this project? I’m interested in the results.

42

I have one of these connected to the pulse input of a Velbus VMB7IN, which reports the water usage on the Velbus network.

There is also an option to program a high threshold on the Input channel of the VMB7IN, so that I can be alerted to high usage.

43

This may be of interest to those on this thread! Smart Home Water Monitoring, Alarm and Automatic Shutoff System. I just stumbled across it. The last commercial offering I had referenced was about $1,500.00. This one at $500.00 is, as least for me, more of an option.

44

Wow thats expensive!

45

I was looking one for myself. Found this one, but nobody was willing to answer my letters in English. So I ditched this idea.

46

The best idea is to attach magnetic sensors to the commercial water meter. That way you will have perfect match with your water bill. They sometimes have RF transmitters so the water company can take the readings but I do not think it is easily readable, also there is privacy concern if you can read the water usage to anyone else. If you are lucky they might provide it online with some API but that is unrealistic :slight_smile: