An esphome configuration that receives messages via serial from Culligan water softeners and sends Gallons (gal), Gallons Per Minute (gal/min), and Gallons to Recharge (gal) to Home Assistant. Gallons can be used as a Water Source in the Energy Dashboard
So far, this project is very much a "works for me" project. However, I want this to be accessible to others. If you have questions open a ticket, I will do what I can to help. If you can make improvements, open a Pull Request.
Culligan water softeners are expensive, please consider the risks to your equipment you are taking when implementing this project. I can't speak to how it would effect your warranty or how your "Culligan Man" is going to react when they find an ESP32 wired in...
Please consider the risk to your ESP32 when implementing this project. The TTL UART on the Culligan controller is 5v, so far my 3.3v ESP32 is working just fine. There are some references on reddit to the boards being 3.3v tolerant, but Adafruit makes it very clear that their boards are NOT 3.3v tolerant.
During the sort time I have been running this I have found that some water users in my house do not register usage. So far my dishwasher does not show up, running overnight I see no usage. My theory is that it does not draw enough volume (gal/min) for the Culligan to notice. Showers, Toilets, Faucets all show water usage. I have yet to test accuracy.
Using this manual I was able to determine that (some?) Culligan water softeners have a debug port that send a simple water usage message every ~60 seconds.
CULL,00420429,000000.0,1,00000902,0x0000,1,0315242140\n\r
The second field is the total number of gallons that the water softener has measured, the third field is the current flow rate in gallons per minute and the fifth is the number of gallons remaining until the next recharge. There are other status, error and timestamp fields that I have not looked into.
The back of my controller board pictured below with the DEBUG PORT. From left to right Pin 1 is Ground (marked), Pin 4 is Transmit and Pin 5 is Receive.
I was able to find 5v from the JTAG port, I can't say that I recommend this as it resets the controller every time I plug the esp32 board in.
You will need to edit cullAssistant.yaml to ensure proper board and tx/rx pin configuration.
Thank you to the Home Assistant and esphome developers, a specific thank you to Samuel Sieb for the serial_csv component and the help in discord