One thing that I could use in a number of places is a cheap smartphone app that can ocr digital meters. In particular, a very simple calculation could predict a water leak from the digital display on a water meter.
Most (all?) smart meters' payload is unencrypted, and can be read with a $20 software-defined radio:
https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433
I now have my electric, gas, and water readings going into Home Assistant - the hardest part of setting this up was figuring out which meter serial numbers were mine, and which belonged to my neighbors.