We have more than one friend who has accidentally flooded their house while on vacation, and for whom this feature would have spared a lot of expense. One interesting feature is that if you activate “Away Mode,” leak alerts will be texted to an emergency contact. It’d be great to tell Flume to ignore water running at 5 AM. That triggers the “high-water-usage” notification that we have set in case someone leaves something running. These are fairly flexible in letting you set amounts and lengths of time, but they don’t let you activate rules based on time of day.įor example, we run our sprinklers at 5 AM twice a week (per our current drought guidelines). Notifications allow you to customize not only the default leak detection setting, but to create rules for receiving custom notifications. The detail screen lets you see your water usage by hour, day, week, month, and year. Even that screen is enough for basic monitoring, and even for noticing the flow rate when you turn a faucet or hose on or off.įlume lets you compare day-to-day usage based on learned categories like Indoor and Outdoorīut you can also dig a lot deeper. The main screen is a dashboard that shows whether it has detected any leaks, your water usage so far today, your current usage, your usage over the last few hours - by hour - along with some charts tracking your monthly usage so far. In any case, if you’re worried about sharing personal data, it didn’t seem to care whether you made something up. I assume that is to help it provide data relevant to your specific area and water utility.

I was a bit taken aback when it required a name and address. Installing and setting up Flume’s app is straightforward. Some water utilities seem to worry about whether that affects meter readings (to their detriment), but our water utility, CalWater, actually sold us ours for a discount as part of a promotion, so it doesn’t seem to bother them. Flume doesn’t seem to worry about battery life, so I’m guessing it draws some power from the spinning meter wheel it uses to measure usage. Ours certainly works fine with the base unit in our basement about 150 feet from our water meter. Amazingly, Flume says the radio between the meter and the base unit can work at up to 1,000 feet. Then you simply need to plug the small base unit into an outlet in an area that has access to your Wi-Fi. In case you don’t have a tool that you can use to open your water meter cover, Flume provides one of those as well (for “keyed” water meter covers). We didn’t need them, but Flume even provides a set of gloves if you don’t want to get your hands dirty when attaching it to your water meter. If your meter is against a wall or the side of a box, Flume provides additional straps you can use to achieve the same result by attaching it to the water pipe itself. If you can reach around your meter, you simply use the rubber straps on your Flume to attach it. Once you’ve verified that your meter is compatible and you’ve received your Flume, installation is pretty simple. The Flume system includes both a sensor unit that attaches to your water meter and a base unit that you place within Wi-Fi range. The bridge connects to Wi-Fi, and ties into both the Flume website and a mobile app.

Once calibrated, the Flume 2 measures the spinning disk in your utility water meter and sends its output to a plug-in bridge that can be placed anywhere in your house. It’s based on your specific meter you upload a photo to the company’s site and it identifies the meter. The Flume 2 ( $199 from Flume) is a small transmitting meter that ties to your current utility meter. Until recently, homeowners have mostly only had vague guidelines like “take shorter showers, water less often, get rid of lawns that need irrigation,” and so on.įlume has introduced a slick tool that will allow most homeowners to get a precise, real-time handle on their water usage. Commercial-scale users have long had tools for monitoring their usage and allowing them to make smart reductions. The result is less water that’s available for people to use-which means higher prices and, increasingly, various forms of rationing. Unfortunately, that trend is expected to continue. But, especially in the western US, they are of increasing duration and severity. Seasonal droughts have been with us forever.

Flume app review