Parsing Flume Water Monitor Email Alerts to Smartthings (Solution)

Devices & Integrations
1

It’s been a while since anyone posted about integrating the Flume Water Monitor into Smartthings. I’ve been using the Flume device for nearly 5 years now and love it.

The only downside is that if it detects a water leak, you’ll only get an alert by email. Flume Monitor doesn’t natively integrate with Smartthings, Alexa, or any other platform that I know.

So while the email notification is nice, it’s not helpful if you don’t check your email frequently. Case in point: I recently was on a 5 hour late-night drive home in a PACNW torrential rain. No way I’m paying attention to my phone!

Well, someone at the house used the guest bathroom and the flapper just happened to not close/seal fully. That leak equates to about 100 gals/hr that goes straight into the septic tank. Over a period of four hours the septic tank fills, the high water alarm goes off, and now you’ve got to spend the next 2 days metering off the excess water into the drain field.

The people back home had no idea what was happening. I get all the alerts on my phone…Septic hi-water, Septic Lo-air, and YoLink Leak detectors.. But again, if I’m not looking at my phone, those alerts don’t do much good.

I bought a Zooz scene controller and now have alarms set up for flashing lights, a Zooz Chime and Alarm sound, etc, inside the house. If anyone is home there’s no way they won’t know if there’s a septic problem, or if a Yolink leak sensor goes off.

The missing link has been with the Flume Water Monitor. How to get that Usage Alert Email from Flume to trigger a switch in Smartthings. It’s a good thing that I’m retired, because this took me literally all day to figure out. Now that I have it working, I figured there might be someone out there that would appreciate knowing the steps…

  1. The Flume Monitor sends Water Usage alerts to my email, ex: myemail@gmail.com
  2. I installed an addon in Gmail called “Auto Reply Pro”.
  3. Setup an IFTTT applet using the Smartthings service. You will send a email to trigger@applet.ifttt.com from Gmail using Auto Reply Pro.
  4. Create an auto reply in Gmail using Auto Reply Pro. Filter ARP to look for the words “Usage Alert!” in the subject line of incoming emails into your Gmail account.
  5. Set the send to address as “trigger@applet.ifttt.com”
  6. When Gmail receives the Usage Alert email from Flume, ARP will scan the subject line and immediately turn around and send an email to trigger@applet.ifttt.com
  7. IFTTT will receive the email, verify your myemail@gmail.com address, and automatically parse this to the Smartthings service which you have set up to activate your designated switch. In my case, I turn a virtual switch on which initiates a routine to do things like turn on a light, sound the siren, etc.

This is likely not a very clearly outlined explanation and I apologize. As I said, I’ve been working on this all day…but I reached the summit! I’ll try and clarify if anyone needs some help.

Cheers

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Email as Trigger to a Virtual Sensor
2

I’ve been eying this for quite some time as a replacement for my older zwave FortrezZ water meter. That’s literally the last zwave device I have left to move to either Zigbee or Matter. The device works great, and with the way the edge driver is set up, I can do most of what Flume does with ST routines/automations, except all that great reporting.

I really wish I could do more development with ST because Flume does have an API (Flume personal API) so it can be integrated with smarthome hubs like ST. Maybe someday that will happen, but for now I like your approach. Thanks for posting.

EDIT: I did find some old Github repos for some ST integrations here and here, but that was back in the old Groovy language days before ST moved to edge drivers. It also is very limited it what it provided to ST, and was bound by polling rate limits (Flume’s, not ST’s).

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