Design and Evaluation of a Sound Based Water Flow Measurement System

This paper presents a low-cost, easy to install sound-based system for water usage monitoring in a household environment. It extends the state of the art but not only detecting that water is flowing in a pipe, but also quantifying the flow thus allowing us to compute the amount of water used. We describe the system architecture including hardware, software and the signal processing and pattern recognition algorithms used. We present an extensive evaluation in a real life noisy kitchen environment. We show an accuracy of over 90 percent on classifying six different water flow levels. We also demonstrate good performance measuring water consumption when compared with the home's water meter.