Home Assistant

Integrating your water usage

Home Assistant allows you to track your water usage in the home energy management too.

Although water is not strictly “energy”, it is still a valuable resource to track and monitor as it is often tightly coupled with energy usage (like gas). Additionally, it can help you reduce your ecological footprint by using less water.

Hardware

Home Assistant will need to know the amount of water that is being consumed in order to be able to track it. Several hardware options are available to do this.

We have the following integrations available for existing products that can provide information about water usage:

Alternatively, the following shops sell ESPHome-based devices, that use a proximity sensor to detect a rotating magnet in your water meter and use that pulse to count each liter of water used.

Alternatively, the following shops sell ESPHome-based devices that use a 3-phase light sensor to detect a rotating disk in your water meter and convert this to the amount of water used in milliliters (ml).

Maybe you like to build one yourself?

  • Pieter Brinkman has quite a nice blog article on how to create your own water sensor using ESPHome, or build a water meter that works with the P1 Monitor integration.
  • AI-on-the-edge-device is a project running on an ESP32-CAM and can be fully integrated into Home Assistant using the Home Assistant Discovery Functionality of MQTT. It digitalizes your gas/water/electricity meter display and provides its data in various ways. Photo of the AI-on-the-edge-device Workflow
  • watermeter running classic OCR and statistical pattern recognition on any system supporting Docker

If you manually integrate your sensors, for example, using the MQTT or RESTful integrations: Make sure you set and provide the device_class, state_class, and unit_of_measurement for those sensors.

For any of the above-listed options, make sure it actually works with the type of water meter you have before getting one.