Smart Water Assistant
So I’m looking to upgrade my water situation here at home. Having a well water system in place, Its always been a pretty critical thing to me to keep tabs on the comings and goings of my well water. In the near future Ill be looking to deploy a whole house reverse osmosis system (US Water Systems Defender Whole House RO System for the curious among you) and its critical to know what my average daily water consumption is as well what my peaks and lows look like so that I’m sizing my Reverse Osmosis system accordingly, and so having some data to analyze in regards to my well water had become a must have thing. Queue Phyn.
Phyn, as a Smart Water Assistant, has been a pretty awesome experience thus far. Phyn positions itself inline from your main water intake and begins to analyze your water habits as soon as its powered on. Through the smart app I can see how much water my home uses on a daily basis, what my water pressure is, water temp, and it even attempts to identify water consumption on an appliance by appliance basis. Ive been using Phyn for about two weeks now but so far so good. I would love to develop some web apps against an API but I don’t yet see that as a possibility just yet.. ill continue holding my breathe. This post walks through my setup of Phyn and the mobile app experience.
In the below image gallery you can see my unboxing. Phyn came pretty well packaged and included only the smart water sensor itself. Assessing my existing water piping, I realized I need 3/4″ couplings to interface with my home water piping. I spent a lot of time trying to find these couplings and wound up finding these at Menard but should be readily available in most big box stores. I found these couplings by navigating to “water meter hookups”. Once picking up some couplings and installing (don’t forget the pipe thread sealant) I was ready to rock and roll.
I shut off my water main and removed a few segments of pipe I had connected in the past via SharkBite quick connectors. Once the pipe section was removed I was able to position my new Phyn sensor and reconnect via SharkBite connectors. When it comes time to deploy my new future Whole House Reverse Osmosis system, ill move away from quick connect fittings (SharkBite) to press fittings for more long-term peace-of-mind. With the water back on and Phyn plugged in, I was ready to move on to configuring the smart sensor.
Phyn Setup
Moving to mobile setup was pretty straight forward. on power up, Phyn will produce a wireless signal that you connect your mobile device to and then launch the Android or IOS smart app to begin configuring your Phyn. Once setup is complete, your off to the races. One cool feature of Phyn is that it can detect water leaks (apparently up to pinhole size) and act on the leak detection by shutting off your water main, thereby saving your floors from flooding. Phyn needs to baseline your home water usage which could take a few weeks or so but once its finished base-lining, you’ll have the option for enabling smart shut-off.
More to come…
Ill add to this post once I have some more time to play with Phyn and get a feel for how it performs. As mentioned earlier, I’m looking forward to a future API integration play and adding some monitoring data to my home Grafana dashboards. Stay tuned.
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