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Human activity event recognition (HAER) within a residence is a topic of significant interest in the field of ambient assisted living (AAL). Commonly, various sensors are installed within a residence to enable the monitoring of people. This work presents a new approach for HAER within a residence by (re-)using measurements from commercial smart water meters. Our approach is based on the assumption that changes in water flow within a residence, specifically the transition from no flow to flow above a certain threshold, indicate human activity. Using a separate, labeled evaluation data set from three households that was collected under controlled/laboratory-like conditions, we assess the performance of our HAER method. Our results showed that the approach has a high precision (0.86) and recall (1.00). Within this work, we further recorded a new open data set of water consumption data in 17 German households with a median sample rate of <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mn>0.08</mn><mover accent="true"><mn>3</mn><mo>¯</mo></mover></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula> Hz to demonstrate that water flow data are sufficient to detect activity events within a regular daily routine. Overall, this article demonstrates that smart water meter data can be effectively used for HAER within a residence.