Smart leak detectors you need in your home

Jason Tucker

Dec 4, 2023 — 2 min read

I read this article You Need Leak Detectors in Your Home, and More Than You Think from Life Hacker today and they mention various places to put leak detectors in your home. Places like water heater, crawlspace, garage, toilets, under sinks, dishwasher, refrigerator, laundry, roof, boiler/radiator, fishtanks and HVAC.

The one place we use ours the most in our home is our garage freezer. It's a freestanding upright freezer and its older and has a lock on it that requires a key. We don't have any little kids in our house so we have the key hanging on a string off the door handle. The lock is a bit of a pain to use and if the seal on the freezer isn't 100% it sometimes frosts up a bit in the corners making it hard to close and lock properly. Unless you lock and then pull on it, it may not be locked and this has bit us in the butt. Subsequently we'll found a puddle under the door where the ice has melted before the content of the freezer have began melting as well. I've installed a smart leak sensor in the hinge side of our freezer sitting on the floor and when the door isn't 100% closed this is where the drips usually form. When a drip hits the floor and enough surrounds the sensor 2 exposed metal pieces and the water complete the circuit and it sends a signal to the hub to send out an alarm.

So what sensors and hub do we use? Aqara!
You can buy Aqara on Amazon and you'll need just 2 things, the sensor and a hub. This posts isn't sponsored and the links are not affiliate links, I can't keep up with such things.

Smart Sensor

Aqara Water Leak Sensor has 20% off coupon

Hubs

Aqara Smart Hub M2 has 20% off coupon

Aqara Hub M1S Gen 2, Wireless Smart Home Bridge has 20% off coupon

In my home I have the Aqara Hub M1S Gen 2 hub, it works with Homekit out of the box and it can talk to all the Zigbee based repeaters you may have in your home. The unit have has a speaker that yells out about the leak and also blasts out to the Apple Home app that a leak was detected. Once you get into this system you pretty my build out your own security system with door, window sensors and temp and occupancy sensors too. This my be your gateway into having a smart home! You have been warned!

Let me know how this goes for you, its saved me from replacing food in the freezer and I'd imagine if we ever have a leak under the sinks or the kitchen we'd be warned as well. Buy many and deploy them they will save you much like they have saved us.

What tools I use produce & promote WPwatercooler

I've been thinking about the video production stack I use for recording, streaming, transcribing, subtitling, repurposing, and promoting WPwatercooler on social media. I thought I'd share what I'm using. If you've used something different, I'd love to know what you

Apple Vision Pro Demo - my thoughts

Today I did a demo of the Apple Vision Pro at the local Apple Store and wanted to share my thoughts. I wear glasses and was told to bring them to the demo so they could pull the prescriptions off of them and then using that information can get the

Kitchen Stove Hood Makeover

Another project in my kitchen renovation is to change up our stove hood instead of buying a $600 one I’m going to fix up our old one. With the hood removed I stripped down, cleaned, sanded and primed the hood to get it ready for paint. I’m going

Transforming Our Kitchen: From Outdated to Outstanding

I’ve been working on our latest home improvement adventure. We've taken a big leap in transforming our kitchen, and I can't wait to share the progress with you all. We've recently converted our stove top to a sleek gas range and said goodbye