DIY Water Usage Meter Circuit

Here’s a design circuit for measure water usage. This is a simple circuit. Here’s the figure of the circuit;

 

Working with the interaction design team, a bunch of us at Teague have been tinkering with measuring water, analyzing usage data in real time to affect behaviors, and storing it to see patterns over time. At the heart of the exploration was a need to cheaply measure water from the tap. Water meters vary quite drastically in price (from $250+ for industrial grade sensors to $6 for garden hose attachments that limit total usage based on rough estimates). We settled on a $20 water meter used for PC cooling systems (the INS-FM17N by Koolance) due to its accuracy, low price, small size, and electronic sensing method that could be easily measured by a microcontroller.