First, I ordered one of those new grey battery packs out of curiosity -- it was a waste of $20...
You'd have to literally break it open to see what's inside. There are two "pins" holding the top and bottom half together, but they are tiny and appear to be rivets. I tried mashing all of my various micro screwdriver tools (various phillps and star-nut types), but nothing would grip. I'm left to conclude those grey boxes ain't gonna open.
But fortunately my Flume 2 came with one of the older black/open-construction battery packs that just had 4 lithium AA batts in it -- easy to work with!
Knowing it was 4 AAs, I originally ordered a 4-AA conversion kit - that was another mistake! In actuality, it needs this 2-AA conversion kit. The diference is the voltage - the 4-AA kicks out ~6 V, and the 2-AA kicks out ~3v. The Flume wants ~3 volts (they new grey battery pack even says "3V" on it).
The 2-AA conversion kit seems to work great -- I just loaded the powered battery and its dummy battery in the lower 2 slots of the black battery pack -- I left the other two slots empty.
I tested my new "battery package", and it was putting out ~3.4v, which matched the output of the original config w/ 4 lithium AA,
Buttoned it all up and put everything back in place, and it's working great so far!
Kicker is you need an outlet near your flume - I installed an outlet near my meter a while ago in anticipation of putting a z-wave shutoff valve in on my main line, so I was lucky there.
I literally just went through the exact same thing yesterday. I also ordered the new battery pack and they sent me one under warranty. My Flume also came with the black holder and the batteries were wrapped with a black plastic. I likewise agree the grey battery pack is a waste of money.
I was able to open the battery pack. I ordered this kit which contains Torx drivers, T1 through T10. The T6 is the size that fits the screws. What I found inside was 4 batteries in a plastic tray and the battery contacts contained allot of soldered connections between the positive and negative terminals. Nothing that could be easily hacked unlike the black holder which the batteries can at least easily be replaced.
The battery pack is wired in Parallel which keeps the voltage at the 3 volt level, the equivalent of 2 AA batteries but doubles the amp hour capacity.
Another interesting fact is that I replaced the black battery pack with 4 new Energizer alkaline batteries until the replacements arrived. These batteries were installed on Feb 8th and yesterday I started receiving low battery warnings. I'm guessing the difference was in alkaline vs lithium.
I'm hoping with now having 2 battery packs installed I will get a year of service, if not I guess I'll be buying that AA conversion kit and running AC to my meter pit.
I predict you'll be just fine. Number 1, I don't see how Flume can argue what you did can in any way damage the meter and number 2, unless they're monitoring how often the users are replacing the batteries I can't imagine there's enough profit at $19.00 to warrant monitoring something like this.
I'm not sure what the conversion kit consists of but you can purchase 3V AC adapters. Perhaps you can connect the adapter to the old gutted battery pack.
I have the Sinope flow sensor and the zigbee version of the valve on primary and secondary homes. They work fine. Their documentation is lacking (imo) wrt the different configurations available and requirements. That aside, in my understanding, the flow sensor will only work within the Sinope device environment and these devices cannot simultaneosly connect to multiple control hubs. This means if you want the flow/shutoff logic then you must use the Sinope control devices outside of HE. A leak is defined as a finite value (no algorithm logic) of something like 2 liters/min for 30 min. You can extend the 30 min value in settings to whatever you like.
@david4 Flume has both Flow time (ie water for 2 hours) and amount / time similar to what you stated for Sinope .. The Flume Device Driver lets you layer in some logic around other events and such to trigger an alarm
