Diving Into the Flume Water Monitor
About a year ago, I bought a smart home water monitor in order to keep an eye my water use at home. The city where I live provides a big rebate on one particular device from San Luis Obispo company Flume. I was immediately curious about how this device could work and was excited to open the box when it arrived and inspect the contents.
There are two hardware components in this system. One component, the sensor, is designed to be physically strapped to your water meter. The other component, the bridge, receives information from the sensor and connects to the Internet via Wi-Fi to deliver all this data to Flume. Flume provides an API for customers to access their own data and there’s even a Home Assistant plugin which should help bring all this information to the platform I run at home.
But I wanted to learn more about how this all works and was curious if there could be a way to access this data more directly. As friendly as Flume seems to be, I do feel that if I buy a device to track my own data, that data should belong to me. But also, it would be nice to know that if Flume ever closes up shop or shuts down its web service, that these devices could all still be useful. So let’s take a closer look at the hardware to see what’s really happening.
