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NEW Smart Watermeter from HomeWizard

Domoticaworld.com Posted on by

 

  • Why a new watermeter?
  • Setup hardware
  • Setup Home Assistant
  • Q&A
  • Summary
  • Next
  • Setup HomeSeer

 

 

 

 

 

New Watermeter, why?

In this blog post I described the “Smart Gateways” watermeter setup. As it was a nightmare to keep this device operational and it was not possible to get support (because of my previous post!) I had to find a new solution and found it!

The water meter from HomeWizard!

 

 

The first thing I noticed: beautiful packaging!
And then there’s the powersupply. It just looks beautiful and has a LONG and flexible USB-C cable. This reminds me a bit of Apple products and it makes you think: if they also have put the same effort in the rest of the product it should be great.
Spoiler alert: it is.

Setup Hardware

These are installation instructions as compact as possible.

  1. Unpack & connect power
  2. Install app using QR code
  3. Register (mandatory? not sure)
  4. Configure app
    a. Location, preferences,
  5. Watermeter is now updating
  6. Name: enter something that makes sense (“mywatermeter”)
  7. Calibrate: run a few liters of water.

NEXT
Iin the HomeWizard app:

  1. Login or register
  2. Add device
  3. Pairing button: keep pressed until blinking blue
    1. Connect to watermeter using wifi? Yes
    2. Select the wifi to connect to
    3. Enter your wifi pwd
    4. Configuring your wifi in device
  4. Adding your device to your home (if you don’t have a home configured yet, configure it and select a fake location)
  5. Calibrate (hold a shiny/metal object onderneath the sensor for 0.5 seconds). Ideally you should have mounted the device on your watermeter and run a few liters of water

The app should now show your water consumption

Installation video: youtube (Dutch)

 

Setup Home Assistant

  1. Auto detect? – First of all check out your Home Assistant notifications. Why? Because it has most likely recognized the watermeter without doing anything.
    NOT recognized? Manually add the integration. Search for “Homewizard energy”.
  2. Configure by clicking “configure” :-)
  3. Confirm that you want to configure the watermeter. Click “submit”
  4. Error message? That is because you have not enabled APIs.
  5. Open the watermeter app on your phone. Click the settings icon (bottom), select “Meters” and click your watermeter.
    Now you can enable the “Local API” at the bottom:
  6. Configure an area (optional) and click “Finish”
  7. Last step: Rename your watermeter in HA. It is a lot nicer to see
    “Watermeter“
    instead of
    “Watermeter (f7c9f17ab3f1)“

 

Q&A

Q: Can you configure a fixed IP?
A: No, the device uses DHCP (perfectly fine for 98% of its users). For those who want IP address control: you can use a DHCP reservation to assign a fixed IP address to the device.

Q: Where can I get support?
A: First of all, don’t hesitate to contact HomeWizard. They are very responsive AND FRIENDLY. They are also willing to receive any kind of feedback on documentation, app or device!
Besides their support you could also post HA related questions in this HA thread.

Q: Does the device have an accessible web interface?
A: No, with the app and integrations it doesn’t need a web interface.

Q: HA: is the Watermeter recognized as a water consumption device (to be used in the energy dashboard)?
A: Yes!

Q: Does this watermeter work in Homeseer?
A: I have created a script that reads the watermeter data using the watermeter APIs. See this post.

Q: Did I use the cloud service?
A: No, because HA takes care of all reporting. So I don’t even use the app. Most of my family would use the app and some would get the (low cost) subscription.

Q: How reliant is this setup on the internet? (as I want it to run 100% local with no outside connections). Can I uninstall the app? Does it need to talk to the HomeWizard back-end OR is that only needed for firmware updates?
A: have to find out.

 

SUMMARY

PROs

  • Professional looking device (not 3d printed)
  • Professional looking app
  • Easy installation procedure using the app. No buggy MQTT setup required.
  • Device comes with a LONG (3 meter USB-C) cable
  • Installation in HA was easy (automatically recognized)
  • Beautiful packaging
  • Powersupply doesn’t seem to be just any (cheap chinese) powersupply
  • OPTIONAL: run watermeter just using 2 CR-123A batteries – it collects data every 5 minutes and updates your app 4x per day instead of real-time.
  • OPTIONAL: for €1/month you get multi-year data stored, leakage alarms, graph exports. Can be cancelled monthly. When connected to another system like Home Assistant, you will automatically get multi-year graphs. Using automations you can create “leak detection” functionality

CONs

  • For me the supplied brackets did not work but I found someone who created a 3D model that I was able to print.
  • Noting else?

 

VERDICT

An absolute GO! This is an easy to setup, professional device that offers all the capabilities that you could think of. It is well worth the money at €49,95*

 

NEXT

  • Create “leak detection” automation, something that notifies me if there’s water consumption when there should be none.
  • Create automations that capture specific water consumption patterns. Example: I want to press a button just before I water my garden in the summer. The script will then monitor the water consumption for 15 minutes and put the result in an entity. You can do the same thing for showering. (again: comment on this post to get more info)
  • 3D Print model for my watermeter:
  • Create a Homeseer 4 integration
    DONE!  See this post
  • Check out other HomeWizard products like:
    • P1 meter (great for people who don’t have home automation)
    • a P1 splitter
    • Wifi energy socket (competing with Shelly?)
    • 1/3 phase kWh meter

 

* = no, I do not have any interest in this company, nor do I get re-imbursed for you clicking links on any of my pages.

 

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