Flume Water

I really wanted this to work, so much so that declined their offers for a refund at first. In the end I have to give up. The app itself is one of the poorest I’ve ever used. The pairing with the hardware is terrible - slow, fails repeatedly, and without any meaningful feedback. Once you do connect which I could only do with help from tech support (and I’m very technical), the calibration step is also terrible. It tells you to run water but if the device can’t be reached, there’s no message telling you this is the case, and much worse, there is no time out. So ironically the device meant to save water would have you waste a whole lot of it. In summary, the app is poorly designed and doesn’t not function well in anything but the happy path I imagine they tested. The hardware is far more sensitive to distance than their marketing would suggest and they also don’t disclose that this distance quoted is for a plastic covered meter box. Many of us have metal covers. My city wouldn’t let me change it. Flume should be upfront about all these details and are not. I wasted an enormous amount of time trying to get this to work. I highly recommend you look for other products instead of this. I hope I’ve spared at least a few people the pair I went through. I’m looking at in-line Wi-Fi water meters now instead.

The city was giving this out to people to install as a way to conserve some water here in Arizona. The city even installed it for us. It does let the city monitor our usage also. Only have to pay for the device if we move it out of the city. The figures have been pretty close to what the city says we are using. I received to the low battery message the day before Thanksgiving and ordered a battery right then. The device turned off because the battery died today Monday 5 days later. Thought the device would be down for a few weeks waiting for processing and shipment especially with the Holiday. The battery came was in the mailbox a few hours after I received the message saying it was dead. I’m impressed how quickly it arrived.

I purchased this device several weeks ago and it has saved me a lot of money. I installed the device over the meter as described and proceeded to calibrate. After about 30 minutes I received a notification that I had a leak. I assumed I messed up the calibration. I checked that all water usage had stopped, then recalibrated. Thirty minutes later another leak notification. I then walked the perimeter of the house and sure enough I saw an unusual pool of water on the side of the house. I dug it up to be sure there was nothing there. To my surprise I found a pipe which had a leak. Amazing.... My water bill subsequently arrived and it was more than $400 over our normal baseline. Without this device I expect it would have taken several more weeks to discover. Thanks for an amazing and seamless product. The only thing that I would love to see is support for HomeKit going forward.