Flume and RainMachine — Home Assistant
I’ve been slowly automating/monitoring specific aspects of my house to better understand trends and possible concerns that can come up. I recently started looking into how I could understand my water usage and reporting on it more reliably. My water utility does not offer very granular billing at all. I’m lucky if I can even find the CCF on the bill, let alone my daily usage.
I started by trying out RTL-AMR, but unfortunately my meter was not being picked up. I believe they are using the close proximity meter reading style and not longer range RF. So with that option out the window I started researching and found that a few 3rd party products do accomplish what I’m after. namely, Flume, and Flo. There are a few others out there as well.
I settled on Flume for the total cost. at a couple hundred bucks with no plumber needed, it seemed like a great option. I got it installed and added it into Home Assistant as I do with everything else.
One of the challenges I wanted to solve was getting leak and high flow rate detection working reliably without any false alarms. Flume does offer leak detection and it does also help alert for high flow rates, but it is still somewhat of a gamble to rule out irrigation watering.
I have a RainMachine that is also tied into Home Assistant, so I figured that there should be a way to help build my own flow rate alarms that work around my irrigation schedule. The bonus to having Flume now is that I can accurately put my flow rates into RainMachine per zone. That’s a nice win! Now if Only RainMachine didn’t require a hardware flow meter to integrate that into their software, I’d love to have Flume data pushed into RainMachine.
I leverage Node-Red as my automation engine rather than Home Assistant. I find it a bit more powerful and it works very well. I setup a new automation that tracks my irrigation system from RainMachine as well as my Flow Rate in Flume.
The resulting automation looks like this:
The results of this automation allow me know when I have a flow rate higher than 10 gallons per minute. But only if my irrigation is not running. Yet another win for Home Assistant being able to help me bridge separate “smart home” things to act together as an ecosystem.
