Since I had a water leak in my former apartment, I started to think about how to measure (and alert) things like (excessive) water usage.
I bought a fluksometer (https://www.flukso.net/) which should be capable to do just that (measure power, water and gas consumption). I only use the water and gas consumption measurement since I already have a Smappee device (http://www.smappee.com/) as well. Just a sidenote here: the smappee should be more accurate in measuring the power consumption since it also measures the voltage and phase shift accurately, 2 factors that also make a difference in measuring power, while the flukso meter is powered by a poweradapter and hence has no clue what the voltage or phase shift is).
I was just out of luck and did not have a “grenade” type of water meter, so I can’t use the reed contact method as described on this page: https://www.flukso.net/content/water-probe
My water meter is a sensus, has as far as I know no magnets in there, so I had to find another way. Asking around on the forum and looking through Google gave me this:
http://dribibu.xs4all.nl/home-en/33-flukso-and-energy-monitoring/320-watermeter-and-flukso.html
Which I rebuilt using this with a piece of wood.
http://www.dx.com/p/meeeno-track-sensor-brick-module-for-arduino-orange-works-with-official-arduino-boards-213949#.VtQvGnUrKAl
Had to test a bit with adjusting the potentiometer till it clearly saw a difference between the metallic and non metallic side of the disk (and added a piece of clear scotch tape to the glass above the meter as suggested on the site, to avoid reflection of the glass itself … ).
Hooked it up to pins 6a (Vcc), and 3 – (gnd) 3+ (signal) and I saw pulses in the MQTT page of the flukso meter.
I also installed the gas probe, which was simply a reed contact you can put in a slot on the bottom of the gas meter (it needs to be put in quite tight though, so it was a bit touch and feel until it worked.
The result can be seen here:
https://goo.gl/photos/C5vdY2TMFA7MN4UJ7
Now a bit of a rant against the fluksometer:
- The site feels a bit old, there is no way to hide or turn off the power graph (which I don’t use because I don’t measure power with it.
- The site only shows graphs and no real numeric values for daily use etc …
- There is no real way to set alerts or alert thresholds if you consume a lot or too much vs a limit.
The device however does MQTT and as I had seen some things around that through Jan-Piet Mens (http://jpmens.net/) presentations on Loadays (http://loadays.org/) I thought well maybe I could maybe start to log the pulses on another device and start to process them some other way… (more on that in part II)