Water Monitoring

Our new place has well water so there is no city provided system to track usage and get notified of leaks that we can’t see. To combat this, I decided to get a whole house water monitoring solution. I ended up with the Moen Flo. There are other options, but Moen isn’t going anywhere anytime soon and the rest either didn’t have the features or didn’t have a big enough presence for me to believe they are highly likely to be around for at least the next 10 years. The downside of them basically all requiring cloud software.

If I were still on city water, I would probably go for a simpler setup. A simple WiFi or Z-Wave controlled on/off valve and water sensors throughout the house.

Water Sensors

I have a few Insteon sensors, but I’ll probably be trying some Z-Wave ones soon enough as I need more.

Whole house water monitors

In general, I don’t think whole house water monitoring systems are there yet (as of 12/2022). From everything I’ve read, the user experience with basically all of the products just isn’t polished enough yet. I can’t say I’m all that surprised. The pool of potential buyers is pretty small in an already small customer pool of home automation users.

My reasons for getting a water monitor

  • No other monitors on our well water system (probably wouldn’t have gotten it while on city water)
  • Pressure monitoring is a good indicator if something is going wrong at the well
  • Remote shutoff as manual shutoff only accessible in the crawl space
  • Daily leak checks
  • Water sensors under sinks, etc. can be used to shut off the water to the house
  • I like being able to track stats

Moen Flo

Pros:

  • Nightly self test
  • Measures both pressure and flow
  • Works with HASS
  • Has an optional battery backup
  • Manual turn off if needed.
  • Alerts and auto shutoff if a leak is detected. (A stuck toilet valve has already successfully put this to the test for me after 50 gallons)
  • Moen isn’t going anywhere anytime soon

Cons:

  • Internal WiFi AP stays active even after setup is complete
  • Internet required
  • 1 year warranty
  • Reports of it not lasting long term in Amazon reviews
    • note: It says it doesn’t like hard water and that’s likely to cause excessive wear and tear. Luckily I don’t have hard water.
  • No way to customize their leak detection if it’s not properly accounting for things like water filters or sprinkler systems

I had it installed in Oct 2022. If I end up having issues with it, I’ll update this page.

Alternatives that may be worth considering

I know nothing about these or their reliability.

  • StreamLabs Control
  • Kohler H2Wise
  • bluebot - Can’t do pressure monitoring and I don’t see how it can detect small leaks reliably just being clamped on the outside
  • Flume 2 - no pressure monitoring
  • Phyn - terrible Amazon reviews

My wishlist

Using the Moen Flo as my base point:

  • local control (I know there are z-wave based systems out there, but then you lose out on some of the leak detection features that get you insurance discounts)
  • the WiFi AP should turn off once paired
  • Customization of leak sensing to account for scheduled water usage that the algorithm isn’t picking up
  • a documented API, especially for pulling metrics
  • Temporarily disable leak detection for x period of time. Useful for situations like needing to fill up a pool.
  • If you’re going to include temperature, it should be of the water itself, not from the local weather station.

If a product had the Flo features + what’s in that list, then I would probably end up recommending it as the go-to water flow monitor. Right now, mediocre is the best experience you’re going to get.

Updated: