Skip to content

Lixee Zipulses : a Zigbee pulse counter compatible with Zigbee2MQTT

Lixee Zipulses is a Zigbee impulse meter that allows you to know in real time your water, gas or electricity consumption thanks to its communications with a compatible hub such as Home Assistant or Jeedom.

Index

    Why does the LIXEE-ZIPULSES Zigbee counter have this price?

    It is a unique product from the French company Lixee because it is very difficult to find a Zigbee pulse meter on the market. In addition, this product has several interesting features such as an external antenna (for good communication range), a temperature sensor to warn you of frost, data storage even in case of power failure and the possibility of battery or mains power supply for installation flexibility.

    Advantages and Disadvantages of the Zigbee pulse counter Zipulses

    Advantages

    • Multiple uses: You can measure your water, gas or electricity consumption.
    • Flexibility: You can connect it to the mains with a 5 to 12 Volt power supply or use a CR2450 battery.
    • Compatibility: Works with home automation systems such as Eedomus, Domoticz, Jeedom and Home Assistant with Zigbee2MQTT.
    • Range: As it has a Zigbee antenna, you can place it in areas further away from your home automation hub.
    • Memory: Memorizes the consumption of water, gas or electricity internally even if there are power outages or communication failures (its values are not reset).

    Disadvantages

    • Needs a Zigbee hub: If you want to use this Zipulses smart pulse counter, you have to use a compatible home automation hub.
    • High price: The market usually brings us cheap Zigbee products but this is not the case of Zipulses but it is an original and exclusive device.
    • It does not work on 230V: You must use a 5-12V adapter or a battery to use this Zigbee counter.

    How does the Zipulses Zigbee water meter work?

    In a house, we can control different devices such as lights, blinds, heating, irrigation and we can also know valuable information such as, for example, our consumption of water, gas or electricity in real time, which allows us to become aware of how we use this resource and we can also create scenes to optimise this consumption.

    Today we are going to discoverhow to easily retrieve our water consumption and how to create different scenes thanks to this information.

    Its function is simple but very interesting: to count the pulses transmitted by a water, gas or electricity meter.

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.

    In my example, I will show measurements of a water meter, but the process is similar with gas or electricity meters.

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.

    By default, perhaps, you do not have a water meter with a connector that allows you to retrieve the pulses and, therefore, the water consumption, but you can add, thanks to a professional in the sector, an additional water meter such as one of the Gioanola brand that DOES have a cable that transmits the pulses and therefore, with this type of meter, we will be able to connect it to the Zipulses smart pulse meter so that it transmits the information with Zigbee wireless technology to a compatible home automation hub.

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.
    Contador Gioanola with Lixee Zipulses

    A water meter compatible with Home Assistant and Jeedom

    Speaking of home automation hubs, the Zigbee smart pulse counter is currently compatible with Jeedom and Home Assistant thanks to Zigbee2MQTT and in this content we are going to see how to integrate it with Jeedom although the process would be similar with any other compatible hub.

    And speaking of Zigbee wireless technology, many smart devices have their antenna inside, but this Zipulses device has an external antenna that besides allowing us to have a better range of communications, which is practical if we have this device far from the home automation hub, we can also install an antenna extension to, for example, deport this antenna out of a box.

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.
    External antenna on the Zipulses

    However, if you have seen my other content, you will know that you can also improve this communication range with other smart devices with this Zigbee technology in your home as long as they are devices connected to the power supply such as light bulbs, sockets, blinds or light modules, smart power strips or any other device.

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.

    Another very interesting detail is that we can choose two methods of feeding:

    • With a CR2450 battery if we do not have the possibility to connect this device to the mains or we simply prefer to connect it with a battery because it is easier to install it.
    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.
    • With a power supply of 5 to 12 Volts which avoids battery maintenance.
    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.

    But that’s not all! For counting pulses, a very practical feature of Zipulses is that, in case of a radio frequency communication problem with this Zigbee technology or simply in case of power failure or when you change the battery, Zipulses has the advantage of saving the pulses in index so that you don’t lose pulse data.

    This means that, for example, if you have a power failure, the device does not return to the 0 value, but continues with its last measured value.

    Speaking of measurements, this device also has multiplier or divisor coefficient parameters allowing you to have an exact value in KWh or Litres depending on the meter you have.

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.

    The French company proposes another very interesting detail that is worth highlighting, which is a temperature sensor integrated in this meter, so that we have an alert and can prevent possible frost.

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.

    And, by the way, this device is not only used to measure water consumption, but also gas consumption, as we will see in other content.

    But today we will focus on this water consumption.

    How do we configure the Zigbee ZiPulses pulse counter?

    To begin with, if you look at the battery compartment, there is a connector near the battery compartment where you can connect the wires that transmit the pulses from the water meter.

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.
    Zipulses can be battery or mains powered.

    Once these cables are connected, we must choose the jumper position depending on whether we want to use a battery or connect the device to the mains.

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.

    When we have chosen the positioning of the jumper, we are going to put a CR2450 battery which is NOT included or connect this device to the current, BUT be careful, we must put a power supply of between 5 to 12 Volts.

    Now, we can include this device to our home automation hub. From the Jeedom home automation hub, I am going to launch the inclusion mode (the process is similar with the Home Assistant hub).

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.

    By default, having placed its power supply, the Zipulses smart pulse counter should automatically be included in our home automation hub without doing anything.

    But if this is not the case, you can press the Link button on your device once.

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.

    Once included, we will verify if the value received is the one indicated and if it is not your case, you can modify the coefficient and the unit according to your installation and your country.

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.

    If we have the history marked, we will be able to follow our consumption day by day.

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.

    We will be able to have additional information such as, for example, knowing how much we consume in euros to have a representation of our water expenditure over time.

    For example, if the price per litre is 0.3 euro cents in our case, we are going to create a virtual one where we multiply our consumption in litres by 0.003, note, 0.003 and not 0.3 since we are talking about 0.3 euro cents and not 3 cents per litre.

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.

    Therefore, if we consume 10 litres, we will see that we have spent 0.03 euros, which is equivalent to 3 euro cents for 10 litres this time.

    And if we spend 1000 litres, i.e. 1 cubic metre, it will be 3 euros.

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.

    Of course, with the virtual ones we will be able to create an infinite amount of information such as a report of daily, weekly, monthly expenses and much more.

    And with this information, we can also create alerts on our phone according to a critical level that we want to set.

    But what is even more interesting in a smart home is to be able to make various smart devices interact with each other according to defined criteria.

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.

    Example n°1: Cutting off irrigation after 20 litres

    For example, if we have a garden irrigation controller and this Zipulses smart pulse counter, we can define to cut the irrigation if for example we have spent more than 20 litres after its activation.

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.

    For this, we have created a scenario that has 2 triggers: the status of the irrigation controller, i.e. it will check if the scenario can be run when this irrigation controller is activated or deactivated and every time there is a consumption detected by the water meter.

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.

    And in this scenario, the first block may be executed if the condition is a change of state of the irrigation controller and that this change of state is when irrigation is activated.

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.

    When this watering is activated, we receive a message “I start watering” and at this moment, 3 variables are executed.

    The first variable we have called “ValueOnOn” is a snapshot of the current consumption measured by the water meter at this moment.

    This measure will allow us to know when we should automatically cut off the water as we will know when we have used 20 litres.

    In other words, if the water meter was set at 135 litres when watering started, then watering will be deactivated when the water meter reaches 155 litres.

    For this, we will use the following variable that we have called “NumLitrosMax” and that we have set to 20 litres since it would be the maximum value of the consumption that we want in our garden when watering.

    This is of course an example so that you can see what can be done, but you can imagine any kind of application.

    And the third variable will let us know when we will reach 20 litres of water consumption.

    As you can see, this block is only executed when we activate irrigation and of course, it will not be executed when we deactivate irrigation or every time there is a water consumption since we have set the conditions of the irrigation status when it is activated so that this part of the scene is not executed at inappropriate times.

    Scenario n°2: cut off water after 1 litre used up

    Now, we see a second block that, this time, is going to be executed every time the water meter sends its consumption, which, in our case, should be for each pulse.

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.

    In this case, every time there is a pulse of our meter and as long as the irrigation is activated, then, there is a calculation between the current measured water consumption and the water consumption we had at the moment we have activated the irrigation thanks to the value of the variable ValorEnOn.

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.

    As I have mentioned, this scenario block will be executed every time there is a measurement sent by our meter and irrigation is activated, and therefore, it will systematically calculate the difference between the current water consumption and the water consumption at the moment we have activated irrigation.

    If this calculation results in 20 or more, i.e. if the variable called “NumLitrosActuales” is equal to or greater than the variable “NumLitrosMax”, then irrigation will be cut off and we will receive an alert.

    Another example would be that, if we are away from home and nobody is present, then the water is automatically shut off thanks to an intelligent valve if there is a detected water consumption.

    For this, in our scenario, we are going to have 2 triggers, a state called “Mode” which is a very handy feature of Jeedom that allows us to choose modes in our house and in our example, we have the “Present” and “Away” mode, which may be useful for different use cases.

    And the second trigger is the water consumption measured by our meter.

    This scenario has some similarities to the first scenario we have seen.

    In this case, the first block will be executed only if we have changed the mode and this mode is set to “Away”.

    That is to say, when we leave home, we press the “Away” button from our telephone to indicate that we have left home and various aspects can be activated, such as, for example, adjusting the heating or air conditioning in economic mode, activating the security system or, in this example we are going to see, we will know the water consumption at the moment we have activated this “Away” moment thanks to the “ValueOnOn” variable.

    In the variable “NumLitrosMax”, we are going to set the value 1, since we are going to want to cut the water automatically in our house, if a consumption of 1 litre has been detected, of course, if we have previously defined that we should not have any water consumption when we are out of our house.

    And we have the variable “NumLitresActual”, which is going to know how much water is being spent.

    The second block will be executed every time there is a measurement of water consumption and the mode is set to “Away”, in this case, it will calculate the difference between the current measured water consumption and the water consumption we had at the moment we activated the “Away” mode.

    This calculation is in the variable called “NumLitrosActuales”.

    If this variable has a value equal to or greater than “NumLitrosMax”, i.e. if 1 litre or more of water consumption is detected, then we will automatically turn off the water thanks to an intelligent valve.

    Zipulses Lixee : Zigbee pulse meter to measure water, electricity or gas consumption.

    And we received a warning message.

    So this Zipulses is more than just a water meter, it keeps us informed of our consumption in real time, wherever we are thanks to our computer or phone, and it can also play an important role in a smart home.

    Technical characteristics of Lixee Zipulses

    • Technology: Zigbee 3.0 (2.4 GHz)
    • Compatibilities
      :Polylang placeholder do not modify
    • Impulse meter compatible with GAZPAR (connector not included) and other impulse meters (gas / water / electricity)
    • Temperature sensor included: To alert you and prevent frost.
    • Available commands
      :Polylang placeholder do not modify
    • Dimensions: 80 x 30 x 22 mm
    • Weight: 50 g
    • Power supply: 3 VDC or 5-12VDC
    • Operating temperature: 0°C – 60°C
    • Package contents: 1x ZiPulses, 1x Antenna, 2x Covers, 4x Screws

    Frequently asked questions

    Can I use Lixee Zipulses with a Tuya SmartLife Zigbee hub?

    No. You must use a Zigbee hub such as Jeedom, Home Assistant, Eedomus or Domoticz. If you do not have one of these hubs, you will probably not be able to use this device.

    Is it legal to install a water meter with pulse output?

    It depends on the legal conditions in each country and it is best to seek professional advice. Generally the main water meter does not have to be removed, but it is possible to add a second water meter with pulse output to the installation in order to retrieve its measurements with Lixee Zipulses.

    Bought together

    Buy now Lixee-Zipulses