Raspberry Pi water meters

Tenshot

I'd like to add a water meter to the water mains coming into our house so I
can use an Arduino or Raspberry Pi to automatically track water usage throughout the day.

Partly to help identify leaks, partly to keep a tally on actual usage.

I've been having trouble finding a meter that is suitable for mains connection, doesn't cost the earth, and has a pulse output I can connect to a Pi.

Anyone else tried this? (I'm not keen to tamper with the street meter, and I don't have an easy way to get power out to it even if I was.)

tnegun

I'd interested in this too! I've built an electricity monitor using a Pi and a Current Cost that logs the serial output to emoncms.org that formats it and gives current and historic usage. To adapt it to water usage would be simple enough with the right meter.

KK4SAM

I wouldnt try to reinvent the wheel and wouldnt recommend bringing mains near your water supply there are realtime Data loggers with 10 year battery life for small money.So you need a water meter with a contact O/P and a Pulse data Logger it will present the Data in Trends and Bargraph and export to excel

tnegun

It would only be 5v DC in proximity to the mains and the data loggers would need to be downloaded. I came across this sensor http://www.aliexpress.com/item/3-4-DN20-flow-rate-1-5-50L-min-water-Brass-Hall-Turbine-flow-sensor-meter/32428679462.html?ws_ab_test=searchweb201556_9,searchweb201644_4_505_506_503_504_10020_502_10001_10002_10017_10010_10005_10011_10006_10003_10021_10004_10022_10009_10008_10018_10019,searchweb201560_3,searchweb1451318400_-1,searchweb1451318411_6448&btsid=57b60ce2-9266-4dd5-af2b-8e1b157e1a55 .

Looks like it could do it with a simple circuit and could be installed after the stop cock under the sink.

Tenshot

A friend pointed me towards this water flow sensor on Amazon UK, which looks like it will do the job for me - only £6.50, and it seems more robust than the plastic ones:



I'm going to order a pair (one for mains, one for rainwater system) and see how it goes. I've read a few sites talking about feeding data to parse.com for logging, so I'll probably start there. Here's one such project.

tnegun

I linked to the wrong one somehow. This is what I was looking it http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Exclusive-Ultisolar-USC-HS43TBT-Brass-Hall-Water-Flow-Sensor-Turbine-Flow-Meter-with-NTC50K-Temperature-1/32460209735.html . It looks to be similar to the one on Amazon but has a flow rate of 60l per minute vs 30 but I'm not sure that would be enough