I have a Flume sensor that works well most of the time, but it occassionally goes offline. Looking for an improvement in reliability. Any local sensor options? I'm ok if it requires installation inline by a plumber...
Are you looking for a simple yes/no flow state? Or more granular than that?
I’d be open to either. A simple yes/no state would indeed serve my primary use case. More granular on real-time basis would be awesome, but I am guessing expensive…
Yeah I’m pretty sure there are fittings that can go in-line with your house water main to detect a flow state and close a contact, which wouldn’t be hard to integrate with Hubitat.
Getting actual flow measurements and reporting back to Hubitat like Flume can do, but all local, is probably a longer shot unless you’re very good with RPi/arduino type projects.
A project like this, for example:
Of course you’d need to use a fitting that’s the right pipe size/thread and ok for potable water.
Pricey, but they make pretty solid kit and the shutoff valve is the main and necessary component here. If you're just wanting flow or no-flow it should fit the bill.
In my former house I used a photoreflective sensors to intercept spinning wheels on a water meter and a gas meter. I forgot the numbers but the resolution per pulse was very good. I was using home brewed pulse counters interfacing to the ISY-994. For the interfacing with HE the wery good choice will be DIY Hubduino Project (yes, DIY but very easy to create). Right now I moved to the apartment and all these metering is somewhat irrelevant.
UPDATE.
For some water meters a simple reed switch could be used to intercept spinning wheel because there is a magnet already attached to the spinning wheel.
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The Shelly Uni Plus has a pulse counter input. You would need to hook up a sensor that can read the pulses. But this said my city is changing out their meters to ones that don’t support pulse readers and are digital. So the longevity of this solution is limited.
Well, regardless how meter reports a value the metering mechanism is a small spinning turbine magnetically coupled to the whatever register. Another words, there is a moving magnet inside the meter housing. In many cases Hall Effect sensor or even a small Reed Switch strategically placed outside the housing can intercept a magnet movement and generate a Pulse. If this is a case the rest is to use a whatever Pulse Counter which could be interfaced to HE
I can't really help, but I haven't seen any integrations for water softeners.
Most of them have flow meters.
Have you tried calling Flume? Maybe it's the wifi signal or distance from Hub to the sensor? I've had this for a couple of years and it's been rock solid (the distance from my Flume hub to the sensor is about 30 ft).
EDIT: Scratch that. After I wrote the response, I thought to check my statistics and guess what - it's been offline for over a month 
lol, I was recently working on my water softener and was thinking exactly the same thing, I need to make an interface or something to get the flow reading to Hubitat, then I could use that for different automations. I will be changing mine out next year, might have a go at it on the new one I buy.
Will you be doing it yourself?
There are some Tuya-based flow meters :
AliExpress : (link)'
AliExpress : (link)
AliExpress: (link)
however, I have no information on how good (or how spammy) these devices are.
Yes, not hard to do, water in, water out, drain. Then program the machine according to the water test results.
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Mine is still good. Wouldn't want to go down the Culligan road, which came with the house, only because of cost.
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Just physically checked my Flume device. It has water in it! That can't be good....
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. I better check mine.
It appears that the sensor itself is waterproof, so you might be ok. Check out the steps here
Yeah, I saw that. But it's unclear to me from that whether they are referring to the housing being waterproof (wrong) or the internal components being waterproof (doubtful). In my case, water got inside the housing and got the internal components wet. I'm not optimistic about it....
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