Water flow monitoring for Homeseer 3

In a similar manner to my gas monitoring, I also monitor water flow. With a simple reed relay pulse counter on the main water meter I’m able to have the following alerts and rules:

• Flow & Cost: Number of Litres per minute, per 10 minutes, per day and per month along with the cost.
• Leakage detection: Water flowing when house is unoccupied or overnight AND no prior movement
• Excessive Consumption:  100 Litres flowed in 10 minutes, very long shower or hose pipe left on.

For the pulse counter, I originally purchased a water meter with a pulse counter. When it turned up I and looked at it, I realised it was just a little magnet on the smallest dial that triggers an ordinary magnetic reed-relay - which is identical to the main water meter on the incoming main on the house.

Fortunately, I had the foresight to run some ducting and a wire up to the main meter when I ran my new water pipe to feed the whole house, so the pulse counter is attached to the meter and opens/closes once per litre of water consumed.

Not everyone is going to be this lucky, so either fit another water meter inside your house or use a wireless pulse counter solution.

I have an event that gets triggered every time the reed relay opens - that event runs a script that increments the 1 minute, 10 minute, 1 day, 1 month counters.  It also calculates the real-time cost down to the nearest penny. You could probably do all this in discrete events and counters, but this script does it all in one go (note I’m not a coder by trade.

(Click the picture below to download the homeseer3 vb script)

The script will update the values of a number of virtual devices, which you can then use to display statistics or create alerts from.

This event triggers if there is a pulse of water and its overnight and nobody has moved and if the watersofter isn’t due to regenerate. (A water softner uses water slowly for a few hours from 1am and looks like a water leak)

This event triggers when nobody is at home, but waits at 2.5 hours to allow the washing machine or dishwasher to finish

Finally this event triggers when 100Litres flows in 10 minutes - which is a long shower, bath or hosepipe left on.