EdwinGH / Watermeter

Measuring home water use with inductive prox sensor on watermeter / Watergebruik meten met een inductieve prox sensor op de watermeter
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elster inductive-proximity-sensor water watermeter

Measuring home water usage with sensor on watermeter

I decided to measure the water use at home, and based my own implementation on the following sources:

I am using a NodeMCU ESP8266 board with an inductive proximity sensor, and the sensor is connected to the Vin, GND, and D4 (GPIO2). The board is powered with a micro USB connection. I put the board in a watertight case, and used a long micro USB cabel to put the power supply away from the watermeter, as the (underfloor) area is quite humid in my case.

(picture missing)

This is how the sensor is 'attached' to the Elster / Honeywell V200 watermeter (which is owned by the water utility company, so don't make any modifications to it!):

Setup

This watermeter has a rotating element with iron, which rotates once per liter. Note that there are different sizes and voltages and NPN/PNP proximity sensors, so make sure to buy the correct one (I use 5V NPN).

I uploaded the Watermeter.ino file to the board; it does the following setup:

The used MySQL table can be created with:

CREATE TABLE `water` (
 `datetime` datetime NOT NULL,
 `pulseCount` int NOT NULL,
 `volume` decimal(10,3) NOT NULL,
 `flow` decimal(4,1) NOT NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY (`datetime`),
 UNIQUE KEY `datetime` (`datetime`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 COMMENT='Water meter readings'

The NodeMCU does not do to sleep (yet?), as pulses can come all the time. Maybe in a next release I can connect the sensor to the wake-up pin, but need to check later...