The leak you actually get is never the one you put the sensor under. You bought two pucks, you put one beside the washing machine and one under the sink, and the water came out of a fitting on the water heater, ran along the slope of the slab and went into the drywall on the far wall. Both sensors stayed dry. Both sensors were working perfectly.
A leak puck is a contact sensor. On its underside are two metal contacts, and it knows exactly one thing: whether liquid water is currently bridging them. That is a good, cheap, reliable sensor, and it reports on roughly one square inch of your house.
Everything people are disappointed by follows from that single fact:
The stakes are not small. Water damage and freezing is the second most common homeowner insurance claim category, around 23 percent of all claims filed, and roughly one insured home in sixty files one every year. The average water damage claim runs about 15 400 dollars, and water heater failure alone averages around 4 444 dollars. Almost all of that number is time. The same failure caught in twenty minutes and caught in twenty hours are two completely different invoices.
The obvious objection is that cameras are bad at this, and for ordinary cameras that is true. Motion detection compares one frame against the next and looks for changed pixels. Standing water does not move. A puddle spreading across a floor over forty minutes produces almost no frame to frame change, so a motion camera will happily watch a basement flood and never fire once.
AI Vision Monitor does something different. An old phone acts as the eye, and a vision AI model reads the picture and answers a question you typed in plain words. There is no live feed and no continuous stream. Frames are captured on an interval only while a scenario is watching, and the only thing that leaves the house is a message, and only when your sentence is true:
Because the model is reading the scene rather than diffing it, it can answer questions about a state instead of an event. A full drip tray is a state. A ceiling stain that was not there yesterday is a state. A dark ring spreading on concrete is a state. None of these are motion, and none of them can be described to a contact sensor at any price.
The second difference is that the alert arrives in words. Instead of "sensor 2 wet" you get a sentence describing what the model actually saw, so from your phone at work you can tell the difference between a small dark patch at the base of the tank and water across half the floor, and decide whether this is a drive home now problem or an after work problem.
| What actually failed | What a leak puck does | What a described check does |
|---|---|---|
| Water heater fitting weeps, water runs along the slab to a drain | Silent unless the puck sits directly in the path | Sees the wet ring around the base and the sheen on the slab |
| Washing machine hose bursts mid cycle | Fires, if a puck is behind the machine and not tucked under it | Sees the spreading water and can name the hose as the source |
| Supply line leaks in the ceiling from the flat above | Fires only after enough water comes through to reach the floor | Sees the stain and the drip while it is still on the ceiling |
| Sump pump stops and the pit fills | Fires when the pit overflows, which is already the flood | Answers "is the pit full" before it tops out |
| Slow condensation and damp on a cold wall | Usually never fires at all, not enough water to bridge the contacts | Reports the damp patch and whether it is growing |
| The puck battery died four months ago | Silent, and you will not find out until you test it | A dead phone or dead wifi shows up as checks that stop arriving |
The one setup mistake worth avoiding. A loose trigger such as "water near the water heater" will fire on the reflection of the bulb on the floor, on a dark patch of old concrete staining, and on the shadow of the tank. Spell out the negative cases in the scenario text: a wet reflective pool or a dark spreading damp patch on the floor at the base of the tank counts. Dry stained concrete, a shadow, and the reflection of the ceiling light do not count. If the floor is dry, do not trigger. That one paragraph is the difference between a check you trust and a check you mute within three days.
There is no subscription. You pay per check, and only for the frames that are actually analysed.
On the cheap model a check is half a credit. A basement watched every 30 minutes, around the clock, is 48 checks and 24 credits a day. The starter pack is 2000 credits for 2.99 euro, so that is roughly three to four cents a day, about one euro a month.
Watching a washing machine only while it runs, every 5 minutes across a 90 minute cycle, is 18 checks and 9 credits, under two cents per wash.
New accounts get 50 free credits with no card required, so you can test the framing on a real scene before spending anything. Push notifications are free. Email notifications cost one credit each. Every camera has a daily credit fuse, so a misconfigured interval cannot run away with your balance.
Why did my water leak sensor not go off?
Because it is a contact sensor and the water never touched it. It reports one square inch of floor. If the leak ran to a drain, soaked a rug, tracked along a joist or evaporated as steam, the puck stayed dry and stayed quiet. It was not faulty. It was watching a spot, not a room.
Can a camera detect a water leak?
A motion camera cannot, because still water does not move. A camera with a vision model behind it can, because it reads the picture and answers a question you wrote instead of comparing pixels between frames.
How often should it check?
Every 15 to 30 minutes for a basement or utility room. Slow failures develop over hours, and even a burst hose takes minutes to cross a floor. Drop to every 5 minutes only while an appliance is mid cycle.
Is this a replacement for a shutoff valve?
No. A device that stops the water always beats a device that tells you about it. Use this in front of a shutoff, or alongside pucks, not instead of either.
Does it work in a dark basement?
It needs light. Leave one low wattage bulb on permanently. Aim at surfaces where water reads as reflection rather than at bare grey concrete, and say so in the trigger text.
What does it cost?
Half a credit per check on the cheap model. A basement at every 30 minutes is about one euro a month. Fifty free credits to start, no card, no subscription.
Point a spare phone at the water heater tonight, type one sentence, and leave it. If the sentence never comes true you will never hear from it again, which is the entire point.
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