Monitoring Water Use in WoowTech
Water sits inside WoowTech's home energy tooling even though it isn't energy in the strict sense. It's still a resource worth watching: keeping tabs on consumption trims waste, lightens your environmental footprint, and frequently moves in step with the energy your home uses.
Types of Household Meter
How you read a water meter depends largely on its age and design. Older units tend to show nothing more than a running total, so the easiest way to capture them is often an AI-on-the-Edge camera build on an ESP32 that reads the digits off the face — capable, though it leans toward the do-it-yourself end.
Newer meters usually include a spinning indicator disk, which opens up two tidier reading methods:
- Optical pickup — a light sensor uses autocorrelation to follow the disk, resolving usage down to roughly 100 ml.
- Magnetic pickup — a proximity sensor catches the magnetic field flipping as the disk turns, with one full rotation standing for one liter.
Ready-Made WoowTech Integrations
WoowTech ships with integrations for a number of commercial water-metering products:
- Droplet
- Flo
- Flume
- HomeWizard Energy
- StreamLabs
- Suez Water
- Watergate
On top of those, anything speaking the usual smart-home radios is fair game too — Z-Wave, Zigbee, and Matter devices all plug in.
Per-Device Water Tracking
Just as with electricity, you can watch individual fixtures or appliances rather than only the whole-house feed. Setting up upstream/downstream relationships between meters keeps the totals honest, so a faucet measured separately from the main line isn't counted twice.
Sensors From the Community
A handful of community-built options round out the choices:
- AI-on-the-Edge — the ESP32-CAM digit-reader, connected over MQTT discovery.
- cullAssistant — an ESPHome bridge aimed at Culligan softeners.
- Muino water meter reader — a three-phase optical sensor build.
- S0tool, Waterlezer dongle, Slimme Watermeter Gateway — proximity-sensor ESPHome devices.
Building Your Own
If you'd rather assemble something custom, viable approaches include:
- ESPHome paired with a proximity or magnetometer component
- Wireless M-Bus capture through an RTL-SDR receiver
- Reading Itron EverBlu Cyble meters over 433 MHz
- Container-based OCR pipelines
Whatever you build, give each manually added sensor the correct device_class, state_class, and unit_of_measurement so WoowTech treats it properly.
Catching Readings With RTL-SDR
In North America, lots of meters announce their counts using the AMR or ERT protocols. A cheap RTL-SDR dongle plus the rtlamr decoder will turn those broadcasts into readings, and the rtlamr2mqtt WoowTech add-on automates the handoff over MQTT discovery — all without touching the meter physically. Which meters work varies by model and region, so check the rtlamr compatibility wiki for yours.
Monitoring Water Use in WoowTech
Water sits inside WoowTech's home energy tooling even though it isn't energy in the strict sense. It's still a resource worth watching: keeping tabs on consumption trims waste, lightens your environmental footprint, and frequently moves in step with the energy your home uses.
Types of Household Meter
How you read a water meter depends largely on its age and design. Older units tend to show nothing more than a running total, so the easiest way to capture them is often an AI-on-the-Edge camera build on an ESP32 that reads the digits off the face — capable, though it leans toward the do-it-yourself end.
Newer meters usually include a spinning indicator disk, which opens up two tidier reading methods:
- Optical pickup — a light sensor uses autocorrelation to follow the disk, resolving usage down to roughly 100 ml.
- Magnetic pickup — a proximity sensor catches the magnetic field flipping as the disk turns, with one full rotation standing for one liter.
Ready-Made WoowTech Integrations
WoowTech ships with integrations for a number of commercial water-metering products:
- Droplet
- Flo
- Flume
- HomeWizard Energy
- StreamLabs
- Suez Water
- Watergate
On top of those, anything speaking the usual smart-home radios is fair game too — Z-Wave, Zigbee, and Matter devices all plug in.
Per-Device Water Tracking
Just as with electricity, you can watch individual fixtures or appliances rather than only the whole-house feed. Setting up upstream/downstream relationships between meters keeps the totals honest, so a faucet measured separately from the main line isn't counted twice.
Sensors From the Community
A handful of community-built options round out the choices:
- AI-on-the-Edge — the ESP32-CAM digit-reader, connected over MQTT discovery.
- cullAssistant — an ESPHome bridge aimed at Culligan softeners.
- Muino water meter reader — a three-phase optical sensor build.
- S0tool, Waterlezer dongle, Slimme Watermeter Gateway — proximity-sensor ESPHome devices.
Building Your Own
If you'd rather assemble something custom, viable approaches include:
- ESPHome paired with a proximity or magnetometer component
- Wireless M-Bus capture through an RTL-SDR receiver
- Reading Itron EverBlu Cyble meters over 433 MHz
- Container-based OCR pipelines
Whatever you build, give each manually added sensor the correct device_class, state_class, and unit_of_measurement so WoowTech treats it properly.
Catching Readings With RTL-SDR
In North America, lots of meters announce their counts using the AMR or ERT protocols. A cheap RTL-SDR dongle plus the rtlamr decoder will turn those broadcasts into readings, and the rtlamr2mqtt WoowTech add-on automates the handoff over MQTT discovery — all without touching the meter physically. Which meters work varies by model and region, so check the rtlamr compatibility wiki for yours.
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