Automation Capable Water Meter?

[Ira]

The Elster C700 is a PD water meter. 1" meter with pulser is about $250, maybe less. Looks like 1 pulse/gal so that's not too great. Also, the low flow accuracy doesn't look to be any better than the other types of water meters.

http://www.elstermet...com/en/629.html

In case anyone is interested, they also have some propane meters with pulse outputs for about $250.

Edit: Looks like you can get optional (powered) pulsers that have either 24.6 or 49.2 pulses/gal for the 1" meter. "Smaller" meters can have up to 200 pulses/gal. Both have a 50/50 open/close ration. At those rates, I guess you have to start considering whether or not your sensor can handle the pulse frequency.

Here's the link to the optional pulsers...

http://www.jerman.com/ABB%20PDFS/INDC7-PUL-001.pdf

 

[dBeau]

I am looking to do the same thing, but I do not have a water meter currently at my house (on well). What meter do you have and what sensor did you end up using to get enough output for the Hobby Board dual counter. What modifications did you end up making to Ed Cheung's process to improve it. Also I looked on the marketplace for tri-corder and came up with only star trek apps. Where did you get said app. Thanks.

The meter is whatever model was supplied by the town. I think it's a Sensus. The sensor set-up is newer model of the one that Ed Cheung mentions. The older one was discontinued. The big difference between my circuit and Ed's is that Ed's uses the comparator's hysteresis to deal with the noisy output of the sensor while I use two comparators into an S-R flip flop. One comparator detects the "top" of the signal, the other detects the "bottom". I also added some 10-turn pots to control the reference voltages and LED to indicate top, bottom, and count. The pots together with the LEDs make it really easy to adjust. Here's a link to a discussion of my water meter circuit.

The Star Trek tri-corder app is the one I was referring to. It takes all of the sensors from your android phone and displays them in various ways. The compass outputs are displayed as a strip chart. It shows a nice sinewave when held against my water meter.

 

[heffneil]

Anyone use any of these meters with a zone from an HAI Omnipro panel? I found one that is NPN Pulse Collector but I don't know if this is compatible with an HAI zone.

Thanks,

Neil

 

[heffneil]

Anyone use puls counters with an HAI omnipro?

 

[franknitty69]

has anyone had any succes interfacing with a neptune t-10? i found out the protocol and it doesn't look like a 1-wire counter would be able to measure anything. although i ordered one anyway to give it a try.
 
i know the scadametrics ethermeter can read the neptune and most other registers, but its $800.
 
if anybody is interested the neptune protocol is:

7 DATA BITS, 1 START BIT, 1 STOP BIT, EVEN PARITY, ASCII ENCODING
 
Example
SAMPLE READ. TOTALIZATION = 00000158
<STX> 2 0 0 S W <ETB> 0 0 0 0 0 1 <ETB> 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 <ETB> h <ETB> 5 8 @ <ETB> 7 2 <ETX>
 
Start Delimiter: <STX>
Totalization Data (Digits 1-6): 0 0 0 0 0 1
Totalization Data (Digits 7-8): 5 8
Termination Delimiter: <ETX>