![]() In 2021, Flume says it will be able to break down water usage by appliance and fixture, which sounds useful and compelling, but we’ll have to see if those claims measure up. However, I tested it by timing the filling of buckets and also comparing the meter reads over 24 hours. Flume didn’t catch some of my initial irrigation runs-I felt it was rather obvious that a usage of 300 gallons of water over the course of one hour couldn’t possibly be anything else-but after a few days of testing, it finally caught on. I was very skeptical about how accurate the Flume would be because it straps onto your water meter and indirectly measures flow rate by measuring the magnetic field somehow. One new addition to the app is its ability to determine whether water is being used inside or outside for irrigation, although this was still in beta during my testing. A budgeting system lets you track usage against a target you set-although Flume doesn’t provide much guidance in figuring out what “normal” water usage really is. One panel in the app shows the day’s water use so far, another indicates if water is actively running (and how much), and a large panel at the bottom provides a 24-hour graph of your usage, broken down hour by hour. The Flume app hasn’t changed much in the last year, and it really couldn’t be easier to use-in part because it’s largely designed to be a passive monitoring system. And while the system did report that it lost its wireless connection a couple of times over the weeks I tested the unit, it was always quick to reconnect and never lost any of my data. I’m happy to report that I didn’t encounter any trouble during setup thanks to the Flume 2’s improvement to its wireless range. Christopher Null / IDGĪ simple dashboard gives you a quick look at water usage, even down to the minute. The Flume Sensor senses this magnetic field and converts it into a very accurate flow rate in line with what your meter is measuring. Flume asks you to run the water for a minute or two to ensure it’s detecting water flow, after which setup concludes and you can begin tracking your home’s water usage in earnest. The rate at which this disc spins correlates directly to a water flow rate. Once you do get the sensor strapped to the meter (which shouldn’t take more than 5 or 10 minutes) and the bridge connected to your Wi-Fi network via Flume’s app, it’s quick work to get everything running. Flume includes rubber gloves and a plastic meter cover opener to help you out, which is convenient. The Flume 2 bridge installs inside your home and relays data from the monitor that’s attached to your meter to your Wi-Fi network.Īs a reminder, installation means getting your hands a bit dirty, unless your water meter is conveniently located in a basement or garage. The bridge hasn’t changed significantly, but it does look a lot more appealing now, and the spindly antenna that made the first version of the bridge look like a kid’s science project has been removed. The bridge is still a small device that plugs in to an outlet inside your house as near as you can get it to the sensor. To the fact that my water meter is located not near the house but rather at the street about 200 feet away, buried underground inside a concrete vault.
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