Water scarcity is already a global challenge, and it will strongly influence wide adoption of water metering in the coming years. Water scarcity from climate change, population growth, and groundwater depletion is rising. Water flow meter is the need of the hour.
Unmetered supply leads to wastage, unfair usage, and huge utility losses. Water meters ensure fair billing, leak detection, and accurate allocation. Smart meters add real-time monitoring, theft alerts, and usage insights.
Wider adoption will drive conservation, revenue protection, and sustainable water use.
Several companies have started providing solution inside society water metering for individual flats. At many places the turbine type water flow meters are getting used.
I purchased this water flow meter from Amazon to see how it works. This variant doesn’t have any communication interface. Almost everyone is buying from China and selling as it is, no value add.
It works on two AAA cells and turbine rotation gives pulse for every rotation, that’s how circuit gets pulses to know flow of water. They have also provided switch to calibrate the flow or reset the value.
Let us see what is there inside this flow meter:
Packaging was very poor, not sure how a seller can send a product like this. Manual was not there inside the package. On the carton it shows the picture of the product and some very basic spec of the flow meter. 100% Made in China.
Flow meter has a Glass display, two buttons, one for resetting the metered value and other one for calibration.
Below are some images showing all sides of the flow meter. Top and bottom both sides silicon rubber part is used to protect from water entering into electronics and battery compartment.
As mentioned above, flow meter is powered by 2x AAA Cells.
Some more images below showing how the cells are wired together using cell holder.
You can easily remove the top cover by removing the sticker, remove four screws and take the plastic cover out.
You can remove the PCB out by first removing the battery connection.
On the back side of the PCB, you can see long read switch, this generates pulses based on magnet rotation on the turbine inside pipe section.
Provision of third button is also there, may be for a different variant.
Circuit is very simple. a low power MCU with display driver, 2x button interface, 1x reed switch input as pulse counter.
I am not sure why do we need to buy everything from China and not motivated to design and manufacture these simple devices in India itself.
Please contact us if you want help to design and manufacture products in India. We have helped several companies in India, design and manufacture successfully in past few years.
That’s all in this teardown, I hope you found it interesting and learned something new.
I will come back with another interesting blog soon.
I am running an Embedded Design House, CAPUF Embedded Pvt. Ltd, located in Bangalore, India. At CAPUF, we help companies build embedded products end-to-end from concept to mass manufacturable product with our hardware, firmware and software development services.
We help companies who are currently buying product from China, design and manufacture in India. We have helped several companies in past for their products.
We also help in design optimizations for power consumption, cost, mass manufacturing, and performance.