The water meter experiment failed successfully

This, my dears, this is how to fail spectacularly:
I wanted to measure my home’s water consumption and track it in Home Assistant. I failed (for now). Read on to find out what happens if you buy all the correct components, follow the instructions but fail to check the type of the water meter first.

I’ve found these fine instructions on how to build a device for reading water meter using a #ESP+magnetic sensor: https://www.pieterbrinkman.com/2022/02/02/build-a-cheap-water-usage-sensor-using-esphome-home-assistant-and-a-proximity-sensor/

I’ve followed this great manual and bought stuff:

• #ESP32 board with a relay (relay is not needed in this project). Original instructions include ESP8266, but I went with ESP32 instead.
• Magnetic sensor
• Some cables

I’ve successfully completed these steps and felt very proud:

• soldered 20+ pins (without cold joints!) on ESP32 and burned my fingers only once,
• flashed ESP32 it with #ESPHome,
• connected cables (hmm, pins are different on my ESP32, there is no D6 pin, so I’ve just connected the black cable to G13 and hoped this is GPIO13).

• Copied P. Birkmanns’ ESPHome configuration .yaml to Home Assistant ESPHome configuration
• Changed his GPIO12 to GPIO13 (because I couldn’t find GPIO12 on my board)

- platform: pulse_meter
    pin: GPIO13

....

• Added devices to Home Assistant (pulse counter, pulse meter, ) successfully:

Tested the setup: Touched the magnetic sensor to a metal and HA started counting pulses.

Until now, all went great and I smelled a victory. But not so fast!

The last step was to attach a magnetic sensor to my water meter.

I’ve opened the water meter lid and found out it already has a strange plastic cover over the counters.

Tried to place the magnetic sensor over the rotating numbers, but I couldn’t.

It wouldn’t sense the rotating magnet no matter where I put it. The lid is on the way.

So, the first attempt to measure water consumption failed successfully.

Finally, I checked what was written on the blocking lid: It’s Diehl IZAR RC I G4 radio transmitter!

Not everything is lost. I’ve found that someone managed to read the transmitted signal and integrate the water consumption to the Home Assistant. So the journey continues (I’m already ordering the receiver component… 🙂

Now I just have to find out what to measure with a magnetic sensor. I don’t want to throw it away.