My neighborhood has had trouble with service line leaks and keeping track of our water bills.

We have one large water meter with bypass for the fire hydrants. But the smaller pipe on the side is probably closer to a normal home water meter. It broadcasts the usage every 15 minutes on a protocol called R900. And it’s in cleartext, so you just need your own radio to receive it.

So let’s get our usage the way the utility company gets it. They don’t crawl around underground in the vault reading the meter. They sit nearby and wirelessly get the data.

With just a little bit of configuration I’m uploading data into a timeseries database (AWS Timestream) and running reporting and alerting from Grafana. The alerting is especially useful and has told me about underground leaks before anyone could have known about them, even before the bill came in. Code is on GitHub https://github.com/seanmcnealy/watermeter