Approach 3—FrankS

Background: There are many homes that use excessive amounts of water and don’t even realize it. I wanted to create a device that can monitor home water a house uses each day. Not only are homes using a lot of water but they are also using hot water, which requires a lot of energy to use. The device will also monitor the average temperature of each hot water pipe. I am also going to have a device that sends data about how much water is being used per flush. The detection of the flush will also come from a water proof temperature sensor. I will collect all of the data for each room and display the information.

Explanation: The devices will be made out of Arduino’s that have a fluid rate sensor, two temperature sensors, and a Bluetooth sensor. The second temperature will be separate and only be use for the toilets. For my prototype I will only make one of each and show and example of how each works and show off the results collected from all of the sensors.

Credits:

 I gained a good amount of code for the flow rate sensor from codebender_cc at http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Use-Water-Flow-Sensor-Arduino-Tutorial/

For the Bluetooth I used a Tinkernut Labs video on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXs7S048eIo

I used code from samuel123abc for the temperature sensor at

http://www.instructables.com/id/DS18B20-temperature-probe-with-LCD/

Budget: I have most of the code and the assembly of the devices should take less than an hour. The part that will consume the most amount of time will be put all of the code together and getting a collection of data into one place. I will give myself ten hours for this but it could take more or less time depending on the complexity of the code.

• Arduino Uno $5 x2
• Temperature sensor $5.95 x2
• Flow rate sensor $9.95
• Bluetooth sensor $1.74 x2

Total = $35.33