Re: Monitoring a new water meter...

["Paul Bendall" <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I know on the Onewire solution people have used the rotating dials to
indicate water usage. Basically a LED with a receiver. At some point
on the dial it is likely to have a different collour or disc and the
change in transmission can be monitored and logged.

Otherwise I guess you could look for a second hand meter and place
this in your house after the main stop-cock. Then the water company
wouldn't be worried at all.

Paul

--- In ukha_d@xxxxxxx, "Neil Ball" <neilball@...> wrote:
>
> Just did a Google to find out that Elster meters are the new name
for Kent
> meters. Back in my energy management days I had to datalog many
kinds of
> Kent in-line meter from 15mm upto 120mm. In their smaller domestic
ranges
> you need to fit a pulse unit to a port on the meter - it used to be
a reed
> switch that would be pulsed by a rotating magnet inside the meter.
This then
> gives you a volt-free output which you can feed into your
datalogger. If you
> look at the image at www.kentmeters.co.uk/en/1242.shtml you can see
the
> pulse module on the top left hand side of the meter. Some of the
larger
> meters have a similar port on the face of the meter under a circular
> knockout. By the time you reach 50mm and above you can usually fit
a pulse
> unit between the meter body and the meter face although this means
cutting
> the anti-tamper tags on the meter so would have to be carried out
by the
> water board.
>
>
>
> If you have a manifold type meter where the inlet & outlet are
concentric
> one within the other then you need to identify your meter from the
models
> shown and contact Elster to find out what pulse module is required.
The
> Elster website also has PDFs on the different meters ranges which
tell you
> the litres/pulse.