ADC SWM-150 Smart Water Meter and Valve Installation

Hey, guys. Hayden here again from Alarm Systems store. And today I'm going to be installing this smart water valve and meter from alarm.com. This is actually a very handy device. It allows you to not only monitor usage and gallons throughout your home, but it also has a high and low flow meter so that it can detect leaks, from a large leak, from a busted pipe to even a slow trickle. You know, even if you just leave the sink on. this, inside that case, there is two pieces of pipe, and one holds the valve and one has the meters attached to it. And I will get this open in a minute. But, essentially, this is just going to attach to your incoming water line, to your home. So our setup is a bit different. I'll be explaining that here in a minute. But anyway, once I get this thing open, you'll see what I'm talking about. that pipe and the devices attached to it are the valve meters. There's really not much to it, but that gray piece there is the valve in the other two pieces attached to the longer section of pipe, or the meters. And then that white part is just a case, that little metal thing that I pointed to that's attached to the other piece of the case that is a manual shut off the handle for the valve. If you ever need it, hopefully you wont hopefully this thing last ya, as long as it needs to, but it's there. Now, inside this cardboard box is going to be a power adapter, and that's actually going to attach to the other white box that's below my hand right now. that's the controller and the Z-Wave transmitter for the water meter. So I'm just going to get this open and then we will jump to, after installation.

All right. So here is the valve in meter itself, this is the part you might want to have a professional plumber do if you are unfamiliar with, plumbing. but basically, this from here to here is the inside of that water valve. and what you would normally do is place it on your incoming line to, your house. But in this scenario, we have a well pump here. pump and tank. So basically we just ran it right after the tank, and then it goes up and feeds the rest of the, building. So, really, the only thing you need to worry about here is that these are lined up the, the valve here, along with the two meters, one's a low flow and one's a high flow, but basically, once it's installed, we need to get our wires hooked up real quick. So it's on here. It tells you, which one goes where? So this auxilary, we're going to disregard it. It's not for anything. currently, supposedly, it's going to be used for something, but, we're gonna start with the valve, and that is this. So you're going to take a little, connector here, put it together, screw it on. Get her tight. And then, the second thing we're going to do is the earth ground here. So it's kind of hard to see. Let me see if I can move you around.

Hopefully you guys can see that. Well, but basically right here is a little clip. And that Earth ground connector is going to slide right on there. It's just a little quick connect to slide it right on. And the next one is for the high flow. And that is this black piece right here. so this only goes on one way, but basically just slides right down in and then clips on. So once you hear it click, if you don't kind of pinch it on there, basically just make sure it's seated. And that is your high flow. And then the last one we need to hook up is the low flow valve. So it's got another connector. I don't even know what you call em. It's a little screw on connectors basically, put it together. Screw it on. Once it's in tight, then you are good to go. Those are your only four connections to get this water valve up and going. So once you get it installed and you get the wires connected, all you got to do is mount the controller and transmitter like I did there, and get your cords all wrapped up nice and tight and make sure they're not in the way of anything. that one that I'm holding there goes to the wall adapter that I showed earlier, and then the larger cord goes to the four connections we just made on the water valve. I'm here in a second. I'm going to show how to enroll it on alarm.com. So I will be right back.

All right. So here we are. And our alarm.com account. And I actually I already have the water meter enrolled right now. And that's because it has a calibration period of about three days that it has to go through before it starts showing proper usage. So I left it enrolled so that I can show you guys usage on, my phone. It actually there's no way to check usage on the computer portal that I have found, and for whatever reason, it doesn't seem to show it on here, but it does show up on the phone. And I'll show you a screenshot of that here in a moment. But anyway, I wanted to show you guys what happens when you enroll it. So, if you're using the computer, you'll go to settings and then Manage devices. If you're on your phone, you'll just choose Manage devices from the left side of the app, that menu, and then you'll choose Add Device. And the water meter doesn't actually have its own install wizard. it just is considered an other Z-Wave device. So you'll click other Z-Wave, and then you will go through the normal enrollment process. Basically, it puts your system into add mode. And then once the system's in add mode, you'll just click next. And then there's a button on the side of the controller that attaches to the water meter that you press and that will enroll it onto your alarm.com account. You'll click next once that's added and it sees it, and then you'll name it and then you are done. So it's pretty simple, enrollment. But a couple things happen whenever that gets enrolled. So after you've got it enrolled, you will see this water flow shut off, will show up under your automation tab. And what that does is determines whether or not it closes the valve and sounds the buzzer on that little controller whenever the water meter detects unexpected flow.

So there's a high flow, medium flow and low flow setting. These settings must be set by your service provider. by default they have extensively tested values put in there. So, 95% of the time you probably won't have to change it. But if you have like an irrigation system or a sprinkler system, anything that uses high amounts of water for long periods of time, you might want to have them adjust it so that it works for you. You'll have to get with them and they have to change it from alarm.com on the back end because it cannot be done from the customer side. A couple of other things we did outside of the water flow shutoff rule are set up arming and disarming commands. So basically, if the system's armed in either stay or away mode, it closes that valve. And if it's disarmed then it opens it back up. You can also set up, flood sensor rules. So we have three flood sensors. So if an alarm is triggered on any of those three flood sensors, it shuts off the water meter. Now one thing to keep in mind if you do this, the disarm command will actually override these three alarm triggers. So let's say you have a flood sensor go off it, set your alarm system off. You have to disarm the system to get it to chill out. But when you do that, it will trigger the water valve to open back up. So you could potentially add more water to the problem. One thing you can do is either disregard this disarm command and do it manually whenever you get in in the morning, or, you can just come here real quick, turn it off, and then disarm the system.

I know that could potentially, you know, be too much to do at the time. So it might be better not to set rules up like this, but. But to each their own. Do whatever you wish. That's what all these automation rules are for. Another thing you can do is set up notifications and we don't have one made quite yet. So I'll go ahead and do that. And basically you'll just choose water under the new notification tab. And the only thing you can really do with this at the moment is unexpected water activity. We were hoping for, maybe like a gallon usage setting where you could set up, and this amount of gallons is used, you know, for the month or for the week, whatever it is, it notifies you. And, hopefully alarm.com will add that in the future. But for right now, we just have the unexpected water activity. And what that does is notifies you if it sees unexpected water flow of any kind, whether it's high, medium, low flow, or if it just happens to see it. When it doesnt think there should be water flow. make sure if you set up a notification, you choose the device that you want to use, which for us is the alarm.com water valve. And then make sure you add recipients to it. I'm not going to do all that right now, so I'm just going to back out. But that was where you would set up that notification. And I also want to show what usage looks like, on the phone app. the computer portal doesn't show it. So here are some screenshots showing, monthly, yearly. And, daily water usage.

So as you can see, any time water is used, it raises a little, bar there on that graph. And if you click on it, it will show you exactly the amount that was used. well, not exactly the amount. I believe that the water meter, from what I can tell, calculates in multiples of five. So if you use at least five gallons within that hour, it will show up. So that's going to do it for me. there's not a whole lot more that I can do, with the water meter at the moment. I am hoping that eventually the alarm.com adds some more features, and I know they're still working on it. It's still fairly new, but, you know, things like notifications for gallon usage would be great. if the gallon usage was more accurate rather than being in multiples of five, that would also be, desirable. otherwise, this is a great device, though. I mean, it catches even the tiniest of leaks. That low flow sensor is incredibly sensitive, and it watches out for a period of two hours where a very low amount of water is used. So if you got even one bad connection in your plumbing, it could save you a lot of money and repairs in that area. And it can also save you on water costs just by setting up those automation rules. So if you guys have any more questions or are interested in purchasing it, head on over to Alarm Systems. We can help you out. Otherwise I will let you guys go like and subscribe. And if you have any comments leave them down below and I will catch you guys on the next one.