UPDATE: check out the setup of the (way better) watermeter from HomeWizard 👍

For the past 15 years I have been monitoring shower water consumption using an RFX Meter. That works fine but it uses 433Mhz to transfer data to the RFX_LAN. And as I want to reduce the amount of technology types and protocols, I started looking for a new solution.

To test a new solution I ordered a water meter from SmartGateways.nl. After approx. 2 weeks I received a small package with the watermeter, a cable and a powersupply.

Installation Experience

The hardware was easy to install. The main installation of this watermeter is fine-tuning the cable with the sensor. This has to be placed above the moving (every liter) metal surface.

The configuration was a completely different story. In order to access the web interface to have to put the device in “config mode”. That means power up the device, keep a tiny button pressed with a paperclip and then use your phone or computer to connect to the temporary SSID. That is a horrible experience. The only environment where I could see this is only to configure the right SSID. After that I want the device to get a normal IP address and have an always on web interface.

The web interface itself is, from a usability perspective, a nightmare. There are fields that you should not touch and cryptic messages.

Quite often I had to re-configure when for some reason the device forgot everything (including water meter readings or MQTT settings). Unfortunately the troubleshooting capabilities are minimal to non-existent. Troubleshooting means: do what you did before, see if you made a mistake and just try again.👎

Hostname or ntp server are not configurable.👎

UPDATE 28 Feb – just found out that the watermeter has not done anything since the beginning of February!!? 👎

Internet or Local?

In my Home Assistant setup I’m trying to have devices talk to the internet as little as possible. The water meter frequently talks to:

– support.connectix.nl
– nl.pool.ntp.org
– mqtt.connectix.nl

What data is being send to their back-end systems is unknown 👎. (except for “diagnostic data”).

Solution: Firewall blocks all traffic from the watermeter to the internet.

Home Assistant

To add the watermeter in HA you need to have an MQTT broker (server). Then edit the configuration.yaml and add a number of sensor: devices and use the utility_meter: functionality to record hourly/weekly/etc usage.

sensor:
  - platform: mqtt
    name: "watermeter_totaal"
    state_topic: "watermeter/reading/current_value"
    unit_of_measurement: "L"
    force_update: true
  - platform: mqtt
    name: "Watermeter MAC Adres"
    state_topic: "watermeter/smart_gateways/mac_address"
  - platform: mqtt
    name: "Watermeter Firmware versie van gateway"
    state_topic: "watermeter/smart_gateways/running_firmware_version"
  - platform: mqtt
    name: "Watermeter Beschikbare firmware versie"
    state_topic: "watermeter/smart_gateways/available_firmware_version"
  - platform: mqtt
    name: "Watermeter Firmware update beschikbaar"
    state_topic: "watermeter/smart_gateways/update_available"
  - platform: mqtt
    name: "Watermeter WiFi Signaalsterkte (rssi)"
    state_topic: "watermeter/smart_gateways/wifi_rssi"
    unit_of_measurement: 'dB'
  - platform: mqtt
    name: "Watermeter startup time"
    state_topic: "watermeter/smart_gateways/startup_time"

More instructions are on the watermeter website.

Summary

The (3d printed) device was small but the installation was complex and took a lot of re-tries and resets. When running into limitations I asked the creator to document this. A few days later I ran into more problems and asked for support. Apparently I overlooked something simple with the many many configuration tries and resets. The response I received was:

“If you ask me to document something, I would appreciate if you read the documentation“

What? The documentation request had nothing to do with my configuration mistake. (well, it kind of had something to do with it). Why on earth would you say something like this to a customer?

At a later stage warranty service was denied because of this review.

Anyhow, it seems to be working except for frequent “freezes”. Last update is that it turns out that the device has not done anything since February 8th? (last 20 days)

Would I buy it again?  No

I have actually thrown it away and ordered a HomeWizard watermeter which is fantastic.

Do you know of a solid watermeter? It would be great if it used Wifi and has an open API. MQTT is no requirement at all.