Flow meter with OS 3.0 problems.

[Water_my_lawn]

I have an OS 3.0 that I just connected a flow meter.
The meter is an ANCO C700 with a SF pulser that uses a 3 wire connection.
The AMCO spec for this meter is 230.4 pulses per gallon.
I see the voltage go from about 0 volts to 3.4 volts during the pulse cycle.
This seems to be OK.

The flow indicator (f to F to f) does not seem to follow the pulses.
It does flip but only after a few second delay. This water meter at
230.4 pulse/gal has a higher pulse speed than other meters that I have seen.
Is this a problem?

In attempting to set the gallons per pulse in the configuration page the
value that I enter gets rounded to .01. The correct value
is .00434 gal/pulse. It also flips from gal/pulse to L/pulse without
me changing it. But this is still the wrong value. The correct
value would be .0164 L/pulse. Thus there is a large error in the
flow rate no matter how I set it.

[Ray]

First, I suggest that you simply leave the flow pulse rate as 1. This really doesn’t matter, it’s just a scaling factor. The volume in the end is the number of pulse times the flow pulse rate, so by leaving the pulse rate as 1, the volume you are reading in the end is simply the pulse count, you can multiply that by the correct pulse rate yourself. Again, this is really just a scaling factor.

The flow indicator you see on the screen always has a couple of seconds of delay, because the screen refreshes every second or so.

You should estimate roughly how many pulses the meter generates per second. If it generates a large number of pulse per second (by large, I mean more than 50 to 100 per second), then I am afraid it’s going to lose some clicks because the firmware uses a combination of interrupt and polling to handle flow sensor, so pulses that come too fast are not going to work very well. Maybe you should choose a flow meter that has lower pulse per gallon.

[Water_my_lawn]

I can see your point. However, it would be nice if the flow rate at the bottom of the front page
listed in L/min were accurate.

My meter at a flow rate of 3 gal per minute and 230.4 pulses/gal would result in 14 pulses per second.
This would not seem to be a problem.

[Author]

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