Manage Water Leaks with Moen Flo Smart Water Monitor — Bruce from Tennessee

This is Bruce from Tennessee with a review of the Moen Flo Smart Water Monitor.

The problem to be solved is that both my church and a couple of friends had really bad experiences with water leaks that went on for days when nobody was around. I’ve also had the experience of the water company sending me a letter letting me know that something was using water constantly over a few days.

Turns out the toilet was leaking for about two weeks before the letter actually got to me. Fortunately, that leak was from the tank into the bowl, so no damage — just wasted water. But waiting for the water company to send me a letter just doesn’t cut it for plumbing issues.

So, a bit over a year ago, I decided that I wanted something that could help me better monitor water usage and automatically shut off the water if there was a problem.

After some research, I picked the Moen Flo Smart Water Monitor. The specific one I got, for 1″ pipes, is currently about $550 from mail order and hardware retailers. The one we installed at my church was quite a bit more expensive, but it is for much larger pipes.

That $550 doesn’t include installation. If you’re comfortable doing home plumbing, it can be a do-it-yourself. I’ll do some plumbing work, but messing with the main water line is outside of my comfort zone. I was already going to have a plumber come to do other work, so I had them install the valve as part of that operation.

There is a subscription service you can sign up for, but I’ve chosen to not do that.

The photo below shows the valve as installed on our main water line, just after the pressure-reducing valve. The location does have to have power and decent WiFi. Fortunately, we had a good spot for this in our garage.

The sensor has an app that installs from the app store. It requires creating an account with Moen, but it was easy to opt out of getting marketing emails. The only emails I get from Moen are the weekly usage reports and alert emails.

After installation, you give the app information about whether you have big water use items, like an irrigation system or a pool. After that, the sensor goes into a learning mode where it just observes over a couple of weeks.

Once the learning period is done, the app will send alerts if the sensor thinks there is unusual water flow. It can alert via any combination of push notifications, SMS, and email. For the more serious alerts, the valve will shut the water off after 5 minutes, if nothing causing the alert doesn’t change or you don’t cancel the alert.

I had a few false alarms at the start, primarily due to the water softener recharging the resin tank. That happens at night and only every few weeks, with the exact interval depending on how much water we use. There’s a place in the app for custom rules for things to not alert on. It took a couple of tries, along with some good email assistance from Moen technical support, but I now have a rule in place so that the sensor doesn’t alert when my water softener recharges.

The monitor tests for leaks by turning the water off for a couple of minutes in the middle of the night. If the pressure drops significantly, there’s a leak someplace. And, as it turns out, mine started alerting to a small leak shortly after installation. It took some detective work to sort out that the leak was in a garden faucet, where the supply line connected to it around two feet below ground. By taking photos of the water meter reading over half an hour when nothing was using water, I was able to determine that the leak was about a quart of water per day. So, this is a pretty sensitive leak detection.

When we’re going to be gone for vacation, I put the sensor into “away” mode, which makes it much more sensitive to leaks and unusual water flows. I do have a drip irrigation system in my garden, and I leave that on when we’re out of town during the growing season. So I also had to set up some rules to cover those actions. That was a bit easier than dealing with the water softener, as I know the times when the irrigation system kicks on. I’ll tease a future review by saying that I’m using Rachio smart water valves, and they’re tied into the Ambient Weather station I have in the back yard, so that the irrigation system automatically adjusts for past and forecasted rainfall.

The Moen Flo sensor has some algorithms that tell you how much water is being used for showers, toilets, appliances, and so on. The numbers fluctuate some, which is to be expected. We’ve had some family in town recently, and I’ve been doing a lot of cooking, so the water use is up a bit.

When I look over a 7-day period of time, our usage patterns for showers, toilets, appliances, and faucets seem reasonable. I can also look into the history list and see, for example, how much water I used in the shower I took earlier today or how much water I used in cleaning up the kitchen this evening. There are also graphs and tables available for daily, weekly, and monthly total household water usage.

Overall, I’m quite happy with the device and with the support I’ve gotten from Moen.

So, I hope you found this interesting. Peace, and may you find beauty in the world around you.