Help with my use-case: 30 houses

[joelhell]

First of all thanks for this amazing tool and all hard work!

Now to my use-case: Im the head of the board for a small economic association of 30 houses where we share the water-bill among us. The water meter is about 100 m from my house on a neighbours back-yard in a well about 2m below ground. There are two challenges:

1. Power to the ESP-32. Im considering using batteries. Perhaps 10-20 18650 battery cells in parallell to power it. In order to cut down on power usage Im considering to use a second ESP-32 with deep-sleep capabilities just to allow and cut power the ESP-32-cam. Perphaps turn the ESP-32-cam on for 10 min every 12th hour. So 20 min on-time per day. Has any of you guys implemented any similiar solution? will this hard-shutdows kill the hardware? Would a mosfet be the way to go to cut power?

2. Wifi-range. Since the water meter is on my neigbours yard maybe the best thing would be to ask for their wifi-credentials and send the MQTT to a web-based mqtt-broker? But then I would not have access to the web-interface of the esp32. Or do you have any experience with using any outdoor wifi-extension that could extend my own wifit about 100m?

A few years back our association had a water leak in the ground where the water provider sent us a bill of 80 000 euro. It would be amazing if I could find a solution for the cost of about 10 euro to give us leak-warnings.

Best regards