We have a water meter that’s by no means smart. We get a letter once a year to update the meter reading in a portal and our monthly fee is calculated. Water is cheap here, so not really a good reason to measure water usage except for sustainability reasons and, off course, fun.
Tinker or buy
A big question is always, tinker or buy? There’s plenty of resources online that explain ways to read your watermeter and how to program a ESPhome device to do so. Our watermeter is in our utility closet though and we also use that (against better judgement) to store our bags and stuff. So I wasn’t really fond of tinkering something in there myself.
All solutions I found online though, were quite expensive (€50 and up) and didn’t look too stable in the physical sense. I was afraid they’d move every time the closes is used.
The solution
Then I found the illustrious-named Waterlezer (water reader in Dutch). It has a flat design, a nice 3d printed case and a nice solution for my watermeter to click it into place. I immediately ordered it and it fits really nice on the watermeter and is really easy to install. They provide great documentation. The only thing I had a little problems with was adopting it into my ESPHome in Home Assistant, but I finally managed that too.
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