Flume Water Monitoring: One Year Later
It just so happens that it’s almost exactly one year since I published the post on the installation of the Flume water meter. Since then, it has continued to help us save water and money. Sometimes in unexpected ways.
At the point of initial installation I found that I had to locate the Flume base station in our living room. I had to move it to the point in the house that was nearest to the Flume sensor, which is in the water meter housing, out on the boulevard.
This is likely because we have bronze metal mesh in our window screens. They tend to block wireless signals. This is also why I installed a supplemental Wi-Fi access point in the attic above the front porch.
Frozen
Over the holiday season of winter 2022 we suffered a couple of very hard freezes. During one of these freezes a fitting under the back of our house cracked. It’s where a metal pipe connects to PVC just before it goes underground to the garage. That metal/PVC interface fitting split. Not entirely unexpected given the different thermal expansion/contraction of metal vs plastic.
When the temperature finally started to rise, and water once again flowed, the Flume system alerted me to the rather dramatic leak resulting from the broken fitting. It’s not like I would have missed it in any case, since water was literally spraying aloud under the back of the house.
Happily, I was able to cap that off quickly. No water to the garage, which meant the “executive bathroom” was out of service for a while. That was only a mild inconvenience.
Frozen 2
The larger issue, discovered a bit later, was all the frozen & broken CPVC pipe along the back wall of the garage. This wasn’t really a big job to repair since the pipe is exposed and easy to work on. However, so many homes suffered frozen pipes that supplies were simply impossible to get for a time.
In fact, I checked Amazon to see if I could buy some common CPVC fittings. A nominal 1/2” elbow, that normally would have been about a dollar, were going for nearly $10(!) a piece, with no guarantee when it would arrive. The only thing I could do was wait a few weeks until local hardware stores and building supply places could restock.
Rock The Cat Bar
If you have pets you may never go to the bathroom alone. In our home, when we visit the bathroom quite often one of the cats will follow along. They especially like to drink from a running water source. And they think the faucet on our pedestal sink is just about perfect, if slowed to a trickle.
Further, they like to take their good, sweet time. It’s not uncommon for a cat to remain at the sink long after we depart. So, with some regularity, the faucet is left running at a trickle. Flume will eventually sense it and alert me (highlighted in orange below) to what it suspects is a tiny leak.
Irrigation Irritation
As the winter of 2022 transitioned into spring of 2023, we took the plunge and hired a contractor to install irrigation and re-sod the whole yard. The scheduled watering occurs at 6am in the morning. Each of the eight zones gets 10 minutes, so the whole routine takes about an hour-and-a-half. And every time Flume alerts me (highlighted in yellow above) to a sustained “high-flow” situation.
As I have described previously, we’re not really happy with the result. Nonetheless, the grass and gardens are now being watered automatically.
Given the past 10 weeks of >100F daytimes highs, with almost no rain, there’s a lot more green in the yard than there would have been in years past. I’ll try not to look to closely at the water bill.
Close
A year on from the initial installation, I think Flume has served us well. It’s alerted us to real problems at least three times, and minor things almost weekly. I admit that I have not been drawn into examining any of the usage statistics it provides.