Every Shower needs this Upgrade! (Online Water Tracker)

[@joostluyten_ON3JT]

Before the company changed my meter to a digital one I had a small reed contact mounted in my meter. Every half liter a pulse. Used the Electric imp(001) to count the pulses. Pushed the data in the mysql db and used AMcharts to visualise everything. Brings back memories. 🙂

[@greatscottlab]

Also sounds very useful :-)

[@tobiashegemann1811]

The Digital ones usualy have a S0 / SML or Modbus interface, sometimes all tree. They can give out a much higher resulution and some statistics

[@WillOnSomething]

What's nice about that setup is it lets you call out the water company's BS when they overcharge you!

[@SumUnicus]

We still have a analog meter with arrow's turning and a counter with numbers. No problem to use a webcam and a raspi to read it :)

[@joostluyten_ON3JT]

@@greatscottlab haha indeed. You can recognise patterns after a while. When my wife took a shower after her night shift at the hospital, or our diswasher, ..

[@evanbarnes9984]

I've never thought of showering as a hobby before, but that's EXACTLY what it is. I also forget time and space while immersed in the warm flow!

[@sylaswojciechowski6895]

😂

[@MCsCreations]

Yeap, I know the feeling.

[@AtlasReburdened]

@@devalue7064 Germans are masochists. This thing will probably take off there.

[@hicknopunk]

You are lucky. Water makes me feel pain.

[@MattyEngland]

@@devalue7064 Crazy that you can't even enjoy a nice long shower now. Politicians need to hang.

[@thewolfin]

Version two: You set a baseline temperature and it automatically dials up the cold water mix percentage as you get closer to the self-defined cutoff time/usage amount.

[@nagi603]

TBF, I thought that's what he did at first. Or constricting flow altogether.

[@Tommy-pv1vh]

thats called a water heater

[@RandomUser2401]

it's also not really accurate given that warm water costs a lot more than cold water and the mixture depends on the desired temperature.

[@HarshilRekhi]

Just use cold water, shower time will decrease automatically and therefore monetary spending will decrease as well. I can’t applaud enough for your ingenuity, great work 👏 A budding KZbinr.

[@greatscottlab]

Great tip!

[@ErebosGR]

Ending your hot shower with a quick cold rinse can also reduce anxiety and depression.

[@Ebolachicken]

Also shower less

[@Lively_1185]

@@ErebosGR Just make sure you don't breathe all the water in from the involuntary gasping that will occur from cold shock. I've had too many falls and close calls from that due to being dizzy and light headed, it's just a bad idea.

[@ErebosGR]

@@Lively_1185 Umm, you can make the switchover gradual if you want to...

[@otm646]

This is how you take the joy out of everything. Not every aspect of your existence needs to be logged and generated as a report in your inbox.

[@charliebad]

I agree but it's still quite interesting from an outsiders perspective, and he seems a really nice bloke. (First vid I've clicked on from his video list)

[@Aser6000]

If you're relying on constant water pressure and flow from your shower for an accurate reading, then you may as well skip the flow meter and have just flow switch and use a timer on the mcu to time how long the water is on for. In fact, just put a waterproof clock in your shower.

[@willw7743]

I was thinking the same. This is an over engineered solution for something that doesn’t actually save you money. A clock or timer would achieve the same (without the data,) cost you less time and money and have value outside of showering.

[@deroffi1572]

My thoughts exactly!

[@frosty129]

Brilliant, and spot on. There’s gotta be a pretty linear relationship between shower time and water usage.

[@deang5622]

Water pressure isn't constant if you can turn a knob on the shower to adjust how powerful it is

[@wiktorszymczak4760]

Do you keep your water running all the time youre showering? Do you never change mode on your shower head?

[@bosstowndynamics5488]

In defence of the cheap flow meter, I suspect that higher end devices do exactly the same thing but have a calibration in their datasheets. The problem is that you aren't directly measuring flow rate, you're measuring rpm as a proxy for flow rate, and since it's an impeller with gaps around the blades a higher flow rate will change the relationship between flow and speed (guessing here but presumably higher flow rates didn't increase speed by as much, would expect to see bypassing to an extent/less efficient operation). Intuitively it makes sense that pulses should match up with fixed volumes but once you lose the assumed linear relationship that goes out the window.

[@andrebartels1690]

There are other types of more exact flow meters on the market. For example, one working principle is measuring the difference in the reflection of ultrasound through flowing media. Or you can measure the different electromagnetic features of flowing (electrically conductive) media vs non-flowing. These two principles are much more reliable than the little repeller doing its funny thing. They are a bit pricey though.

[@ffoska]

That should be the manufacturer's job though, to provide the user with a curve/ function or lookup table for the sensor they are selling. It's not that hard to build an experimental setup for getting halfway decent curve, so shame on them for not doing it

[@dadsgarage738]

The flow meter needs a consistent stream to work - most flow meters use some form of restrictor or other method to remove turbulent flow. It wouldn’t matter if it was ultrasound or conductive or mechanical - the sensor won’t read consistently if the application is correct.

[@philippegauthier2212]

Using a flow meter is still a widely used way to measure volumes in industry. Usually you don't have a curve for the flow/pressure/etc as it depends on your liquid (water vs oil for example) they give the relationship for pulse per turn. Some flow meters do have a relationship for pulses, but those sensors measure an actual volume (ex 3.14ml/pulse). What is done to make accurate and repeatable measures is called a K factore. If you have a constant flow for example coming from a pump you can simply do the calculation at the rated flow, but if the flow or pressure or liquid change, you need a multi K factor compensation. It is done by taking multiple measurements across the flow variation. Then you do a linear interpolation between the K factors. An example would be for example a variable speed pump in an oil pipe and you need the result in kg. You will start by taking the number of pulses and the frequency at 10% speed, and for each 10% up to 120%. You can do it for a couple of different temperature points as well if you have a temp sensor. Then in production if you read a frequency at 63% you interpolate from you 60 and 70%. I don't know if it make sense the way I wrote it, but I do those kind of things regularly where I work. We are able to get below 0.5% error with cheap sensors and this method. Our process requires less than 2% error.

[@richardcranium7404]

@@philippegauthier2212 you are correct on a number of levels, as are some of the other comments to some degree. High quality flow meters often use a four wheel paddle and hall effect pick up. The issue we have always found is turbulence in the fluid flow. There must be some distance between the entering and leaving ports of the sensor from any kind of bend, valve etc that creates any kind of turbulence

[@MladenMijatov]

You should really mark `pulseCount` as volatile since you are updating that value in interrupt so that compiler does special optimizations for it and you avoid some of the really hard to debug issues. I'd also implement sleep mode which Atmel supports. In that mode its power consumption is really really low around 0.1 micro-amp and interrupt can wake it up. It's simple to implement and makes rest of the code even easier to implement since you'd just have to upload stuff, call sleep and be done with it.

[@ffoska]

Good idea, gets rid of the bulky float switch. Also I would add price calculation for hot water, since you probably don't use cold water for showers, and the bulk of the cost comes from heating the water with electricity or natural gas, not the water itself

[@Cheesypockets]

@@ffoska This. Though the heat may come off as an estimate since it takes time to run the hot water through or heat it up. You could probably do an estimate based on the temperature.

[@Gurux13]

Trouble is, it's ESP8266 in the end which has a different idea about deep sleep and interrupts, but yeah, it is possible to solve this problem without an extra water switch.

[@JasperJanssen]

ESP is not atmel.

[@JasperJanssen]

@@Gurux13 I’m not so sure that ESPHome - which integrates nicely with Home Assistant - implements deep sleep very well. Maybe I’ve just missed it so far.

[@DEtchells]

Great project! Two thoughts: 1) it would have been yet more complication in the code, but you could also measure the pulse frequency and use that to adjust the conversion factor based on flow rate. 2) They probably don’t exist as commercial parts, but you could use the water flow to run a small generator to charge the battery whenever the water is running. I think it could easily produce enough power that you’d never need to charge the battery externally. The project was already more than complex enough and works plenty well, so these would be needless additional complications, but I don’t think it would have been *too* difficult to implement a first-order correction for flow rate.

[@srtghfnbfg]

I think #2 is actually nice, although my noob idea was to hook up some alternator to a spinning wheel and charge automatically 😂 wouldn't be very waterproof probably

[@Helli__]

Have you considered using a micro turbine to help with powering the circuit/charging battery? It would probably make this a lot bigger, but it may be interesting how long it would last.

[@Tigrou7777]

What about using the waterflow to generate a small amount of power and charge a capacitor ? (so there is no need of battery)

[@cokeacolasucks]

Or, could the running water charge the battery, instead of a capacitor? I am intrigued about the capacitor idea, though...

[@SpecialeW]

Quint BUILDs tried to power some electronics with his shower once.

[@Tigrou7777]

​@@cokeacolasucks I am pretty sure that the whole thing does not need a lot of power to operate, so a capacitor might be enough and easier to charge than a battery. It's same idea as RFID cards.

[@mubeenalamkhan9761]

@@cokeacolasucks Battery need a lot of power to charge. extraction this power from a fossed flow is not possible. i you even found a generator to do so, the generator will convert the kinetic energy of the water flow to electricity, reducing the pressure at shower head, ruining the shower experience

[@greatscottlab]

Tried it. All commercial water turbines I found could not nearly produce enough energy for the system.

[@RealAphotiX]

Apparently you can use MEMS to 'listen' to your water flow. I've seen sensors sold that work non intrusively and I'm guessing this is how they work. One should be able to connect this to their main to detect all water usage even in apartments. I'd love to see a project using MEMS (or even a cheap analog microphone I suppose) in place of a flow meter.

[@ffoska]

Now that's an idea. Thanks!

[@mrtechie6810]

Ultrasonic sensing is far more expensive than turbine.

[@DonParlor]

Good job Great Scott! I did a similar project with a YF-B5 flow sensor. At the end of each shower, I programmed a Service Call to Google Home Mini speakers to shout out how many litres have been used, how long the shower lasted, and what % the shower duration was compared to national average. For the ON/OFF flow sensor, I didn't use a mechanical one, I programmed a boolean to tell if flow was On or Off.

[@1kreature]

You can read the blinks on your watermeter... Most electronic meters generate power by the water sensor and has a indicator light that registers a certain amount of liters.

[@balanbogdan9160]

I can't belive he is at 1.7M subscribers. I ve been following his channel for years and never been disappointed. He is working soo hard for these videos, and explains things pretty well.

[@Paxmax]

Did you include the cost of heating the water to a comfortable shower temperature? I don't know how it's done in other places in Germany, but did you also include the waste water fee?

[@wayland7150]

Waste water is simply the water that you use.

[@geneshort8160]

He is speaking of sewer fees

[@whizzbang7520]

He didn't include the costs of warm water heating, as seen on his improvements sheet in the end.

[@MyProjectBoxChannel]

I love these flow switches and flow metres. When my boiler needed replacing I salvaged them out of the old boiler. I also got some out of an old coffee machine from work. I used them in various projects to detect water and biodiesel flow.😉👍

[@TonnyCassidy]

thing with sensor used there is that those are sold as FLOW METER sensor, not meant to measure volume of water flowing through it

[@henrik.norberg]

As someone with no "running water" during about 6 months in winter in, north of Sweden, I'm using a reservoir with 1200 liter (used to be 600). That is about 6.5 liter per day for drinking, cooking, showers, dishwasher and some limited washing machine (I try to wash at other places than home). It absolutely astonish me to see others water consumption 😃 I'm planning a mobile tiny home and will have water consumption messure like this and ultrasonic water level messure but also just now building a shower that recirculating water with inline filters for a usage of about 5 liter per shower no matter how long it is used (with inline instant water heater to keep temperature). But the upside is that my water/waste bill is zero since I live in the forrest not connected to the water grid 😀

[@basvandersluis5662]

I thought that I was over complicating stuff when it comes to home automation, but you sir, have beaten me. I also measure water usage, but I added a proximity sensor to the outside of my water meter. My water meter has a small metal piece that rotates and passes by when one liter has been used. The proximity sensor can sense that disc. Now, my boiler has an API, which allows me to check if it is heating water or not, so I know when hot or cold water is being used. As far as I can see, you have Techem water meters. I believe they can be read from the outside using a 866mhz signal.

[@mr_gerber]

MHz, mHz - whats nine orders of magnitude between friends

[@datort]

Off-Topic fun fact: I closed a meeting this morning with the phrase "aaannnddd see you next time" thinking the whole day where this phrase and pronounciation came from. Now I remembered. #addicted ;)

[@greatscottlab]

😉

[@7777Felix]

Really nice project! But I think the price/recourse calculation are quite off, since heating up the water is way more expensive than the water itself and heated tap water has a much higher climate impact than cold one. Tap water has a footprint of something like 0.35 gCo2/liter while heating the same amount water for 20° (for example with natural gas) costs around 13 gCo2/liter. So much more than the water itself!! So adding a temperature sensor would be really useful I think.

[@yekutielbenheshel354]

Oh please stop peddling "save the planet" claptrap. We are on the cusp of extremely cheap electricity thanks to extremely cheap solar and extremely cheap wind energy. Steel and aluminum used to be extremely expensive too; nowadays they are extremely inexpensive. Burning fossil fuels at scale is very rapidly being phased out. In another 20 years fossil fuels will probably hardly be a significant source of energy. Once that happens all of this greenhouse effect, er, uh, I mean global warming, er, uh, I mean climate change hysteria will no longer "be a thing." Learn to think clearly and scientifically. Don't succumb to fearmongering.

[@drawingboard82]

Thank you very much Scott. I have been thinking of making something similar. I live in Scotland where water is charged at a flat rate (It rains a lot) and there isnt a significant environmental problem with using a lot of it. What is not free however is hot water. So I intend to measure the temperature as well as the flow rate and work out the Kwh consumption. Unfortunatly my wife has installed one of those fancy showers with multiple outlets so that will nicely complicate the system! I'll need a display in the shower too because thats where the infomation is going to do the most good.

[@lernenmitrobin]

Great project as usual! If you search for "water turbine 5V", you'll find different kinds of micro hydro generators you can put in series to you measurement part. It could be used to recharge the battery again. Maybe you need to convert from 12 V to lower voltage, but as I know you are an expert in voltage conversion ;-)

[@kevalnakar6269]

You can save water by collecting it from drain and use it again for shover, Since there is clean water in drain after sometime. Idea seems doesn't cool But good and can possible. Personally I don't use shover at all. Thank you so much

[@JuanAmeijeiras]

It's a nice project. The water flow sensor that you got is cheap as it is not calibrated, it is just a flow sensor (yes/no) and not a calibrated sensor which can cost 10 or 100 times more than that and is restricted to flow ranges, pressure, temp, etc... If you get a calibrated one definitely the project can be moved into the main pipe, right after your internal water cut-off valve so you can track all house water expenditure. I have a similar project (it can be powered all the time as it is in a humid zone and not in a wet zone) but used a cheap meter and faced the same issues as you did with different flows.

[@lmaoroflcopter]

Nice! What with droughts ongoing at the moment it's super good to track this. I have always just turned my shower on and off during my shower whilst using it, like the old showers that used pull handles to allow water to run.

[@oneilgoisot9615]

To solve your charging port problem you can use magnetic charging port, it is really cheap and I've used this solution in few projects! For warm water price there's few solutions, just measuring water temperature and calculate the amount of energy necessary to heat the volume from 18 to 38 and assume that your heating system is 100% efficient (if it's electric). Or you can simply measure the power consumption during a day and average the consumption. Last solution is to transfer this device from your shower to your heating vessel and measure all your hot water consumption

[@applicablerobot]

This is a flow sensor. Proper way to use would be making a pulse rate to flow rate calibration table (hopefully it's linear?) Then use a lut in the code to convert pulse/s to flow rate. This flow rate can be integrated to determine volume of water used

[@lernenmitrobin]

Another idea is to measure three temperatures: - cold inlet - hot inlet - common outlet. Where you already know the amount of water at the outlet, you can calculate the cold and hot inlet water flow with a "Dreisatz" ;-) . When you also have the temperature difference ∆T from hot inlet to cold inlet, you can calculate the amount of energy you used for heating the water with: w = c*m*∆T. Where c is the specific thermal capacity from water with 4190 [J/(kg*K)], m the amount of water from the hot inlet in litre or kilogram [kg] and ∆T the temperature difference from hot inlet to cold inlet in Kelvin [K].

[@NEhusker55]

Awesome build, I’d be interested if the variability in the water sensor is consistent enough to be calculated… I’m thinking if you can measure rpm and adjust the output accordingly. E.g, if 1k rpm = 5 liters per minute and 2k rpm = 20 liters per minute and 3k = 25 lpm we should be able to create a curve to approximate the output based on flow rate… makes me want to build it just to find out :)

[@greatscottlab]

That sounds like a good idea. Definitely worth it to look into it. Only problem for my setup would be that integrating such a curve into the home assistant programming would be kind of hard.

[@NEhusker55]

@@greatscottlab Ahhh I'm just starting to dabble with home assistant. Definitely didn't consider that element. Thanks for sharing!

[@tobiashegemann1811]

Endress and Hauser has some interesting in deph explanation Videos about All kinds of flow meters

[@gmeesen]

@@greatscottlab You could implement the curve into the program on the ESP and let it report ’linearised’ pulses instead of actual pulses. That way you can still use a constant conversion factor from pulses to L/min in Home Assistent.

[@SpeedFlap]

@@greatscottlab Let the ESP do the linearization and conversion to liters and liters/minute. You already know all you need. Just take the low flow and high flow pulse-per-second and make linear interpolation between the two from the input pulses in a time interval. Should be pretty much precise enough to do the math once every second.

[@cybrwerks]

Ive been watching for years, I didn't even realize I wasn't subscribed to the channel because every new upload was on my feed. Just subbed. Sorry I know it doesn't help the analytics but just know that I have learned a great deal watching this channel.

[@somewaresim]

Fantastic idea! I need this to show my family how much water they use in the shower. :)

[@greatscottlab]

Yes :-) It is really a revelation to see how much water gets used there.

[@sonicmistress]

Really what are you a weirdo with nothing better to do.....Want to show how much water you use in a shower....Put the plug in and when you've finished, then measure it! No need whatsoever to moan about the 'Environmment' whilst making over complicated parts, that in total actually cost what to produce and ship and package, in plastic no doubt, plus using Lithium Batteries on projects.....The hypocrisy is laughable. Plus if you can't get in a shower, clean yourself in about 2 mins, then get out, there's something missing....

[@bertoid]

I'd put this sensor on the cold input to the hot water service, where the pressure is much more constant, and it then also accounts for all hot water usage. And provided that the HWS is outside of the bathroom, much of the special safety issues are obviated. The alarm could be a simple radio activated standalone unit. My external HWS is controlled by an AVR with an RTC that follows a temperature schedule, so that overnight the water is kept lukewarm, but gets the water hotter at the times that I will need it. It also records inlet, tank, cupboard and external temperatures. I think I'll add one of these flowmeters when I upgrade it.

[@elpaustian]

I've thought about that too. My idea was to set up a small camera that films the numbers on the water meter. The clue is that the arduino camera module is hooked up to a Raspberry Pi Pico which converts the pictures into numbers by a machine learning algorhitm. That way you won't interfere with the water meter and your readings would be quite acurate. Also there are tutorials for TensorFlow Lite on KZbin which is designed to be used on micro controllers. After googling my idea I wasn't sure if this already exists, but find out yourself! Greetings!

[@totallyrandomlocksandpicks]

Hey cool project! I installed one of those flow metres in my beer fridge so I would know how much beer I had drunk, or not for that matter. Interesting and useful to know the actual usage, compared to the perceived usage of any liquid that's costing you money.

[@greatscottlab]

Haha that also sounds like a totally german application for such sensors.

[@CubiCNooBiC]

idk what flow meter you have but most of them (at least the ones that made of brass) are not lead free...

[@totallyrandomlocksandpicks]

All good lead has its place, the one I used was food safe plastic with copper fittings designed to be used with water filtration equipment I'm pretty sure, I'll be fine. Interesting project, however I found the impeller agitated the beer and produced more of the fluffy stuff than it would have at the same psi if served from a tap without a flow metre so maybe not really worth doing.

[@simplemechanics246]

Old joke, fridges ordered the beer already 20 years ago over online.

It is very clever solution! The first thing on my mind was - why just not to read plain numbers from the water meter - directly in the place where water pipes are. You can "simply" take a photo on regular interval, process the image for extracting numbers and then store it in Home Assistant even with better precission and not only for one shower pipe. Anyways, the flow sensor seems to be much more fun and challenging project. Everytime I watch your video you get me inspired!

[@LouieS-PH]

There are commercially available ultrasonic or electromagnetic flowmeter that outputs the reading to a monitoring system like SCADA. Water companies use this to remote monitor the flow and volume.

[@arnoikke]

Only yesterday I was thinking about making a similar thing for the shower where the first cold water is diverted to a large toilet's flush reservoir and then, once up to temp, automatically switches to shower. I lose about 5L until the water has heated up so might as well catch it for flushing.

[@andrewhussey2002]

Why not divert all the waste water to your toilet flush?

[@mrtechie6810]

@@andrewhussey2002 too much!

[@dh2032]

like the project Idea, I have a suggestion: could do a the same sort of project for button shushing toilets, (or may be toilet in general) a different angle, of the same problem, false, or phantom, flushing does not stop, and in only noticed next time, the toilet or bath/shower is used, could be happing for hours or even days, if happens and you not being in you home at the time? alter the project a little, to say a little more than say one load water, without an interrupt in the water flow, (a water on, off as fill water tank, for next use? a water solenoid (auto on/off) would be nice, but even just big loud sound (like remote door Bell) would also help?

[@BeardedTinker]

Did you consider using home water metering valve for this same purpose? Possibly in combination with occupancy sensor in bathroom (that could also trigger ventilation if needed).

[@Mr-Widget]

I'm using MQTT, telegraf, influxdb, and grafana, which does a wonderful job of graphing data over time.

[@JacobKasperek]

I think the next big step is to make this device absolutelty passive and battery-less with just the power of water stream (maybe even heat) making the circuit work. Great work!

[@shabbagadoosh]

I think a small battery acting a bit like a ups alongside a flow charging system would be great

[@odonald6087]

add a coil to a second flow meter and power the esp entirely from that! Exactly the sort of project I would expect from GreatScott

[@bansheedearg]

For an SR latch, I've used 555 timers, which is surprisingly easy to wire. It's called "bistable mode" and if you search for "555 bistable" you will find it. Hence 555 timers can be used not only as flip flops (SR latches), but also accept a wide range of input voltages (4.5 to 16 volts), they cost very little, and you could always use them to make blinkenlights.

[@king_james_official]

i'm pretty sure they accept even higher voltages

[@romancharak3675]

As much as I love my Electronics Hobby and Microcontroller Projects, using a low-flow shower head is a much better solution. I received one of these shower heads many years ago from my Gas Company. There is no guilt in enjoying a longer shower with one of these devices. And they don't require batteries.

[@Leoappeared]

Same, I can now shower three times a long using the same amount of water. You can get them super cheap and as long as you don’t have super hard water require no maintenance

[@manuellongo4365]

The problem with that sensor measures flow at a specific pressure. If the pressure is increased and one liter is taken as a sample, the time taken is less. The same amount of water will pass but in less time. The little impeller of the sensor has to turn faster. Flow=volume/time....in this case time depends on pressure.

[@matteofreddi9260]

Great Idea! I would also put an inline small water turbine to keep the battery charged meanwhile the water is passing the sensor.

[@MCsCreations]

I'm just starting to watch, but it made me remember of a small generator I've seen once from China... You basically cut the pipe, let's say, and put it in the middle. You know? Perhaps it could be a good way to measure the water as well... And produce some energy at the same time! 😃

[@alexlogical6240]

If you want to keep using Arduinos, you can install an MQTT broker like mosquitto on your home assistant instance and get the data to it that way. I used that recently even though I used an ESP, as esphome is server initiated and MQTT is client initiated. As my device is only on for a few seconds, as it also runs on batteries, this allows me to wake the device, send the data and go to sleep immediately without having to wait for home assistant to connect.

[@gizelle-s]

If you had 2 water pipes that were open to the air, I'd suggest using a TEC to power it, you could use the disparity between the hot and cold water to power it then. But, that would only work when using both hot and cold water.

[@Pippy626]

Love the videos! I want a diy water temperature display and keeps the water at that temperature. My hot water doesn’t last long and need to adjust the temp every minute to keep a constant temp

[@publicmail2]

The flow meter for my water main use ultrasonic doppler without a break in pipe and its accurate. You can add a streamlabs water meter, it just zip ties to main and is wifi, accurate down to .3 gals/min. no water pipe to undo, takes 3 mins to install uses ultrasonic doppler thru wall of pipe.

[@GoodVrGames]

Simple photodiode at old measurement device or pulse-wire at new one (without corrupting certified device). You already have measurement device on input pipe, use this.

[@PPRstudio]

That reminded me about my plan to get water pressure meter with IoT. My house is small and have no space for water tank and pump, sometimes water flow is really slow so I need to know when the water pressure is highest and pick the best time to shower.

[@glenmiller1437]

Neat project. Several years back we had a $1000+ USD water bill because of a broken water line after the meter. (In Hawaii, palm roots broke the line. The soil is very porous so there was little visual indication we had a huge leak.) We found a commercial product called Flume the goes against a USA style water meter and senses the flow. It requires batteries (special high capacity AAs) that last about a year. Still, it works great, gives you stats, warnings on usage, peace-of-mind, etc. I would have enjoyed making something like this instead, but for the whole house. You'd need to work out sensing that measured the flow without making any changes to the piping, though. A GreatScott version of that would be a great follow-up project.

[@qo92]

If showering in a bathtub, you could just put the stopper plug in and let the bath fill up with the shower water. The level in the bathtub could be measured with some markings on the side of the tub.

[@AlexApol]

Great info for your German audience. Heating prices this winter are going to be insane.

[@greatscottlab]

Yep. Trying to help a bit here :-)

[@robsycko]

We have a hole house meter that measures in cubic feet, I can take a picture with my phone daily to track usage. 1 cubic foot equals 7.481 gallons of water.

[@paullacatus8975]

I have a Bosch instant gas heater for warm water that is producing the electric energy for his automation from the water flow having a small turbine. I think that such a solution will be better for your appliance.

[@suromark]

I'm using an ESP32CAM module with the camera focused at about 5 cm to take snapshots of my hot/cold meters' readout every hour, controlled by my home automation Raspberry Pi. The Pi activates the camera's LED, retrieves a cropped JPEG of the digits to its SSD (only if they've changed) then turns off the illumination again. It doesn't run image-to-text yet but at least it's building a history of measurements ...

[@frobertopereira]

I start follow the channel recently and watched this video just today. Congrats for your well done videos. It has plenty comments, I can't pass through all of them. If someone already suggest it, just escape it. You use two devices on the pipes, one to measure wather flow and other to recharge the battery. I was wandering if the second device isn't enough to do both things. You would need access the inductor inside the second device to sample the flow signal. I don't know if it would be easy, but would reduce one mechanical part of the set.

[@racingheart92]

You are a genuine teaching University. Hope i can work under your guidance

[@misthafalls]

Well this is an interesting topic, since I was busy with the water flow sensors today as well. But my main idea is not for water usage measurement per se, but the measurement in flow between hot and cold water paths. The reason for it is to use the percentage in the flows between the two paths to automatically set a temperature point for a water heater within a showerloop system. In this way I can have a completely regular shower install, but have the temperature and the rest of a showerloop system be completely automated. If I finish this project then I will definetely post something about it on youtube and github about it :D

[@ffoska]

Just an idea but maybe for showers you could use the waste water. Measure it's temperature under the drain and adjust accordingly. Although that's definatelly a workaround and does not work for baths or filling stuff with water like buckets

[@misthafalls]

​@@ffoska Well it is a showerloop, so all the waste water will go through a pump, filters (sediment, uv) and the be reheated back to a desired temperature (complete water re-usage). In this case I am trying to get the temperature adjusted by using a standard shower value (so no thermostatic valve) and checking the water flow on the separate paths to set a temperature. So far I have all the individual components working as necesarry. But the code and design is rather primitive and experimental (breadboards, janky scripts). So the next step is to get it all together and create a more professional cohesive system :) Also looking at maybe automatic removal and refill of shower water after a certain amount of rotation. btw. water will always be purged after a shower end, so every shower will have fresh water.

[@ffoska]

@@misthafalls That's a really nice concept you got going on. Nice work!

[@kihok8688]

Big factor in cost is temperature on the water, energy to heat it is a big issue when showering. :) Nice video BTW. ;)

[@deepblueskyshine]

One thing you can google out from literature and other liquid flow mechanicl measuring projects is that there are two factors apart from mechanical friction, ballance and fluid dynamics affecting accuracy of a propeller sensor: first is the density, or volume weight of the propeller's material should ideally be equal to the dencity of the liquid measured; and the second factor is that flow resistance in the pipe before and after the sensor should be equal. Regarding the second factor some orientation is provided in the printed mounting manuals provided with regular water meters saying that before and after the meter a straight piece of pipe of the same diameter with lenght of minimum 5 pipe diameters shold be provided (in other words, it's more accurate to experiment finding out pulse count to volume relation with shower hose mounted after the sensor).

[@xxxwinnersgamexxx]

A proper conclusion in the future to this project would be nice. Is your water consumption going down? How long does the battery hold up?

[@GertvandenBerg]

My main water meter has a place for getting data out (Some data sheets call it "impulse emitting devices", other it seems like there is a place for a reed switch to get pulses) (mine (a Sensus meter) seems to have the reed switch output) "T-probe reed switches" seems to be the term used for those sensors (I mainly see South African discussions - so it is possible that it is mainly common on our meters...)

[@sparshdhiman72]

I AM DEFINITELY MAKING THIS! NO DOUBT!

[@ramoniroger]

You could use a 5v generator using the water flowing itself. Less pressure, but no battery required

[@thepastplayer4988]

Awesome project, that was my next project for my garden watering system 👍 Have you considered using ultrasonic water sensors for your main's water supply? This way you don't have to modify your water install ?

[@greatscottlab]

Ultrasonic? Never heard of them. Got a link?

[@Lucidbkeo]

ultrasonic flow sensors are hideously expensive

[@thepastplayer4988]

The sensor itself is usually referred as an Ultrasonic Flow Meter Transducer on AliExpress paired with an Ultrasonic Water Flow Meter main unit

[@yannickziermann9731]

@@greatscottlab To not modify your main water supply, it only works with an clampon method. Its not that simple, but it can work if fitted well. For ultrasonic flow measurement there is a lot to consider instead of just counting pulses. Yet the principle is quite simple. Two transducers alternately sends a burst and this time is measured with a TDC. The ultrasound in flow direction is faster than the ultrasound against flow direction. This difference of time is directly proportional to the flow. So with a simple formula with offset, diameter of your pipe, length etc you get a decent result. You may need some correction factors, becauer there are different flow pofiles (laminar and turbulent). I just remembered that you can also buy ready systems. Then, of course, you don't need to know anything about ultrasound :D

[@arontsang]

@@yannickziermann9731 Not sure you can use clamp on systems for that, since you would want to isolate the transducers from the brass.

[@schto173]

Nice plan.I did expect you to track also the heat of the water as the energy needed for heating the water probably exceeds the cost of the water itself. I would expect a shower to cost around 0.5 Euros probably.

[@nezu_cc]

Many of the moderm power/water meters have either a wireless or a ir/wired interface where you can "easily" read the data of them in a similar way that your utility company does. I know a few people that do exactly that. This gives you the most accurate graphs possible(literally the exact same that your utility company sees and charges you for) and does not require any modifications to the meters themselfs

[@ConfidentGrips]

This was what I thought about doing

[@noanyobiseniss7462]

Half way through the vid had to run in and shower (before company arrives) and man it feels good on a hot summer day! :D

[@twinsen04]

Hey, it looks like you also have Techem water meters. If it's like the ones I have, they wireless transmit a coarse value of their measurement every 5 minutes or so. Using an ESP32 and an SX1276 I managed to reliably read and decode the packets of my water meters and heater meters, but my project didn't go further than that. If you or anyone is interested, I can share my schematic, board and code.

[@TheHellis]

Wasn't the data encrypted? I have the crappy radiator sensors that apparently lives their own lives and as far as I have understood they are encrypted. I haven't tried listening to them though, I just read at Techems page they have encryption.

[@twinsen04]

@@TheHellis The protocol supports encryption but for some reason they don't use it. I can read the sensors of maybe a few dozen neighbors in my block. But it might depend on version or how they are set up when they are installed.

[@dschaedler]

There are sensors that can read the main water pipe counters without interfering with them. For example homematic makes sensors exactly for that.

[@frollard]

Friend of mine did similar by stealing the wireless signals transmitted by the water meter - it transmits every minute or so the account number and usage. With an RTL sdr he can listen to all the neighbors - once he figured out which was his he pointed the sdr to an mqtt thingamajig. Granted it dilutes things down to much longer intervals, and misses multiple users at once - but he's a bachelor so it doesn't much matter.

[@fraenkli]

I added a water counter to the mains without modifying it. Mine does have a spinning wheel and with the help of a led and an BH1750 I can count my water consumption. Send the data to NodeRed and visualize it with grafana.

[@StefanoFinocchiaro]

You could put the esp in deep sleep and restart with an interrupt pin instead of creating a set reset switch. Also you can make automations in the ESP itself with the ESP home firmware

[@Transtrash]

Very cool! But why wouldn’t you just run the wire to that valve and hide the black box somewhere else like maybe an access hatch in the wall or something

[@alerighi]

Cool. You can also combine it with data from your boiler or water heater to know how much money you spend on hot water, that is really the cost of making a shower. On a modern boiler with the OpenTherm interface you can get a lot of data about what it's doing so it shouldn't be that difficult to get it (you can also get the flow of the water that passes trough it, thus you can avoid the sensor in the shower, if you estimate the percentage of hot water that you mix with cold one).

[@garci66]

For home assistant I found it easier to take tasmota or just the plain Arduino esp and just send updates over mqtt to HA. You can build all the logic you want on the Arduino side and send processed data to HA. I did that when I reversed engineered the protocol my washing machine uses to communicate between it's various components. This way I can report to HA how my washing is going. On HA you just get a "processed" source of data. No logic to build on the HA side.

[@mubeenalamkhan9761]

to measure the flow rate of the water u can use the venture relation. by knowing the pressure and the area of the pipe u can determine the flow rate.

[@ndnygren]

I made this for the kids shower, but with a valve to shut off the shower after their time is up. I also accounted for the ability to do a submarine shower(on and wet, off soap up, on rinse) it times the total time.

[@likewisepro]

Always nice to see your videos. It is way better than national tv. Maybe you should be hired to make educated tv I did not understood how you are computing the consumed liters. I recommend you to measure liter per minute and running time and then finally compute the liters consumed, since the sensor is more suitable to monitor velocity values.😉 Stay Creative.

[@ggorg0]

When I first saw this title and the thumbnail with no wires, I was sure that it is using some kind of water generator to power itself. Well, it isn't but that's a pretty good suggestion! Edit: Maybe use the generator to charge the internal battery to get waaay more runtime and still preserve the stability of a battery.

[@simoneazzoni3882]

Add a thermistor in the pipe and get the temperature of the water while you are at it

[@TrollFaceTheMan]

It is a interesting project. But technically if you are always running your shower at full blast then you could just see how much water that uses (Like 3.5 Lpm) then keep track of the time to find your usage. Example: 3.5Lpm x 30 min = 105L water use. Seeing as hot water is what takes much more energy and cost to make this would be more useful on the hot side in my opinion as a reminder to maybe not use as much. I also am guilty of long showers/baths.

[@yurcchello]

regular water meter counter is driven by rotating magnet. you can modify it: remove front panel with digits, install hall sensor, send data

[@greatscottlab]

Thanks for the feedback :-)

[@OtherDalfite]

Pretty sure messing with your meter in any way is illegal, or at least it is here in the US.

[@yurcchello]

@@OtherDalfite i don't mean to touch working one. they are cheap and maybe old meter is laying around

[@OtherDalfite]

@@yurcchello oh ok

[@james10739]

They have generators that get over from your flowing water if that provides enough power that would have been a neat power solution maybe with some caps to smooth out the voltage and to run for a couple seconds after it's off

[@Twitch_Blade]

You could probably use the pulse interval to calculate flowrate and then calculate volume from that, with consistent water pressure this would work. If you wanted to get fancy you could even add a water pressure sensor to add accuracy.

[@jaroslawpiotrowski210]

Super Project for crisis time - high enery cost, ect Few ideas: - use ultrasonic flow meter on "houses pipe" - use low enegy solution (on battery) or transmit data via LORA to the Home IOT centre :)

[@Mr_ToR]

HACS is something you will install when you progress being an automator with HA. It is an amazing free store made by people for people. There is nothing awkward about it. Also, since I started using Home Assistant, I stopped using arduino since I can do everything much easily and with native wifi. There is multiple times less overhead with HA compared to Arduino.

[@thedamnone]

You could charge the battery with a water turbine, there are faucet mounted turbines on the market that power RGB LEDs that indicate water temperature.

[@Leif_YT]

With access to the water meter the "AI on the edge" project could also be interesting. It's using an ESP32 cam module to read & analyze an analog water meter. The live update rate is probably a lot slower, but if statistics by hour or day are enough it's a nice project.

[@hicknopunk]

An esp32 for edge processing? It can barely emulate Atari 2600

[@Leif_YT]

@@hicknopunk It uses Tensorflow Lite which is optimized for the use on Micro Controllers.

[@hicknopunk]

@@Leif_YT that is bloody impressive

[@stepheneyles2198]

Link to the video mentioned by @Leif: kzbin.info/www/bejne/mpDYaZZpl9pgsMk&ab_channel=AndreasSpiess Edit: Apologies, that is not the original video, but mentions it. Leaving the link as it's interesting and related anyway.

[@andychesaru632]

I think it's possible to ditch the battery completely, and use the pressure of the water itself to spin a small dc motor to act as a generator, with a cap to smooth things up and to provide for power spikes(when wifi is involved). This way, it only runs while water is flowing, and no battery is required (nor charging). With an energy/gas meter on the water heater, a calculated cost per shower cand be sent to the phone automatically! :)

[@DmitriyKhazansky]

The relevant time to know you’re in the shower for too long is when you in the shower. Toss in an RGB LED visible on the outside of the box that will indicate where you are for your current daily water use limit.

[@Pystro]

Yeah, I was thinking the same when he said that he can check on his water usage from anywhere in the world. That description just so happens to exclude the one place where I'd want to check it. I really don't get why people get excited every time they can connect something to the internet. It's similarly annoying to the trend of more and more things getting battery powered. Alarm clocks, smoke detectors, kitchen timers and similar really don't need to be mobile. You COULD easily just plug them in. For example, since (in Germany) electrical junction boxes are usually near the ceiling, they could just include a USB port for powering smoke detectors. A kitchen timer could be in a feed-through wall plug and wouldn't even take up an outlet spot. In fact, EVERY "you plug the transformer into the outlet" type plug could be feed-through. You wouldn't want to plug a transformer into a transformer into a transformer (that is, if that contraption is hanging from a wall outlet), but plugging a desk lamp into your phone charger shouldn't be an issue at all. (Unless the desk lamp is connected to the internet and will loose it's settings every time you want to take the phone charger with you.)

[@7777abel]

nothing like seeing a guy develop a contraption for saving a couple of bucks on water using a $20k+ Keysight scope 😂 made my day

[@aurelian8383]

great project, you should put a small water to power generator, I bet it would make most of the power to run the entire thing

[@Phettsack]

A local display would be great to see the own usage directly.

[@309electronics5]

Nice project! I will add some more circuitry like a shower timer that turns of a solenoid valve so the water going to the hose gets blocked. Ofcourse i can turn of the timer aswell if i don't want the feature