Munnecke: Our hose faucets/bibs are on the same main lines with the flow sensor, so for example if we are washing the car, the flow sensor registers flow rate. I was thinking about having a timer such that after a predetermined amount of time, if the flow rate doesn’t go down then it would trigger and send a message. I actually had a hose hit by something falling in the wind at night and it broke a hose connection and had some damage to my driveway and $200 in water bill increase from just one day. Would have been nice to be notified within an hour for example (via text etc). I’ll look at MQTT but I don’t know how easy it would be for the OS to communicate with MQTT. As for your flow rate sensor, you should ask the company what wire to use. I’m using a shielded wire where the shield is ground, and the inner is the signal and I don’t seem to get any glitches, although the length is only maybe 25 feet. Did you connect it to the rain sensor input? perhaps the pull-up is too strong, or a series term resistor may help. Looks like there is a lot of noise on the cat5 cable. I think cat5 is usually for differential signals and is UTP (probably unshielded twisted pair) and unless your receiver is subtracting the two wires I’d go with a shielded cable with shield grounded.
I have a similar scenario where i’d like my main controller to communicate via TCP/IP to the secondary controller… Since I have one flow sensor covering both OS’s.
Once the data is logged and a computer can access it, then we can run perl scripts etc and grab the data. I have a script that shows all my zones and how much each one costs per zone based on actual water usage and flags which zone may have trouble (outside of set thresholds).