Definitely check in with the utility before mucking with the meter. You can find your way into a lot of trouble tampering with active meters. Chances are there's new meter tech out your utility would install, and of which you could take advantage.

Check this thread. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/smart-water-meter/451935 . You'd install it down flow of your utility meter, and would need ESP32 to read the meter. It's a bit of work, but if you're already running ESPHome, it looks pretty straightforward.

On a long shot, you might consider looking into an inexpensively RTL-SDR software radio dongle, and use rtl_433 to scan a few common frequencies the utilities use to scan their meters from the street. I happened to find my neighbor's electrical meter on a common wireless weather station frequency, and if In were so inclined, could publish it to MQTT for HA to pick up.

Just a couple of ideas. Good luck!

I'm curious to hear what people come up with, as I quite fancy one too.

I would be wary of installing anything that actually touches the water that doesn't come from an accredited manufacturer, however. As you don't want Ali-express grade metal in your drinking water.

Which unfortunately means the options will be either expensive, or building off the back of other equipment currently installed (water meter, etc).

You can get used Yokogawa AXF water meters pretty cheap on eBay. They'll put out a 4-20mA signal and as long as you get the right version for your local power you can just wire a cord to it and plug it into the wall. Only measure flow and I think temperature though.

If you are using zigbee you should check Sinope Sedna Walter valve with the optional water flow sensor. It is supported in zha using quirks from claudegel on github.

Just make sure you select the ZigBee one since their WiFi one need their proprietary hub to work.

Slightly old post, but hopefully still helpful to someone:

I managed to read out my analog water meter using the following ESP32 image: https://github.com/jomjol/AI-on-the-edge-device

It uses an ESP32-CAM module that actively reads your meter, using machine vision. The data is then published via MQTT. There are even some stl files for cases/mounts for common energy meters.

Once setup properly (with a 3D printed case from the provided stl files), I found it to work quite well. I have a pretty clean standard German water meter though.