hamw wrote:I wrote up the install here. Overall it went pretty smoothly.
Following Berkinet's advice I used one of the digital inputs on the 8/8/8 board to count the pulses, and it works! As the meter spins the little dial rotates under the sensor and sends a pulse to the Phidgets board. The pulse is incremented with a trigger into a variable. So, no frequency counter required (yaay! total project cost is now $75 bucks cheaper!!).
There are a couple of things I'd like to do:
1. Total up historical water usage on a current day, prior day, current week, prior week, current month, and all months prior for one year (and maybe two or three?).
2. Use the pulse info to determine if there is a leak. It seems like water intensive things could create false calls, for instance running a bath or washing a car. I'm thinking that using the occupancy sensors (SPR, FMF, alarm status) during the day to determine if someone is home and suppressing a trigger would account for most of these events - I don't think my wife will allow motion detectors in the bathrooms! Then, monitoring strictly for any flow when everyone is away, and at night when everyone is asleep might pick up slow leaks.
I think both of these could be done with Applescript and some triggers. I am OK with AS but am not sure how to get time dependent things like current day, prior day, current month, prior month etc into a script. But, this reporting is very similar to what the RFXcom plugin's Rain Sensor already does. If anyone has suggestions how to write such a script I'd be very appreciative.
Nice write up