I have installed a cheapy water flow sensor just after the meter at home. The sensor gives a 5V square wave that cycles with water flow. It's hooked to a wemos which counts the pulses and sends the data via wifi to influxdb/grafana. The sensor is from Banggood and was $9 with postage. It works amazingly well for $9 but it has 3 major problems. First is accuracy, it can be a good 25% out. Second problem is it is not linear so 1 pulse doesn't directly equate to a certain water volume. They supply a formulae but it doesn't work that well and is open to a bunch of timing issues. The third and biggest issue is it has "start flow" which is 1L/minute or 2L/min in different parts of the "documentation". The whole reason I put it in was for leak detection, we have a larger property with lots of taps. At 2L/minute we could have a 3000 litre per day leak and not know.
So I looked for better water sensors and found some that fit the bill but they were $380 and only did one pulse per half litre, so the resolution wasn't that great. So my question is, does anyone know of a water flow sensor that isn't cheap but doesn't cost the earth? Something that is 3/4BSP that I can install at home?
So I looked for better water sensors and found some that fit the bill but they were $380 and only did one pulse per half litre, so the resolution wasn't that great. So my question is, does anyone know of a water flow sensor that isn't cheap but doesn't cost the earth? Something that is 3/4BSP that I can install at home?
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