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http://www.itwatchdogs.com/products_mon.shtml

Basically, you're looking at $300-$1000 in hardware, but it can interface with Nagios.

If we ever move our servers to the basement, I'll be setting these up to monitor for flooding or temperature issues.

I would use a product called Weather Goose a water sensor and Dartware's Intermapper.

http://www.itwatchdogs.com/ - They have other environment monitors as well.

http://www.intermapper.com/ - As if this isn't already apparent, though it isn't necessary if you want to do some programming.

I second the IT Watchdogs products. We have a WeatherGoose hooked up to Cacti. Works like a charm.

We bought a WeatherGoose for one of our server rooms. They are fairly cheap ($399 for the unit) and have many accessories that can be purchased as well as leads for "homebrew"/specialty sensors.

The WeatherGoose has a builtin web server that has (among other things) an xml feed...this makes writing scripts to interpret the data a breeze...not to mention it has a builtin "pager" alarm that will email and address whenever an alarm is tripped (high temp for instance)...

IT WatchDogs

Hot Little Therm but see the warning about no longer selling them ... great thermo probes, wish they were still selling them. I am glad I have a few extra.

Weather Duck and Power Egg

These ought to do the trick just fine. A bit of configuring or shell scripting, send email to a cell phone or pager or whatever, you should be happy as a clam at high tide.

There are probably others as well. There may even be source code on sourceforge. Hot Little Therm has software. Weather Duck may also.

Weather duck is a neat little gadget made by ITWatchdogs. It's listed at $179 on their site, and seems like a pretty cool little device.
Monitors Temperature, Humidity, Air Flow, Light Level, Door open/closed (I/O ports) internally plus it has a bunch of external sensors you can hook up to it.
Even says:
"With the supplied software, you can receive e-mail alerts or be paged when temperature or any of the other values is exceeded. View the data on the web. Log in Excel spreadsheets. Add a $40 Web Cam and the software attaches a picture to the web page."

Ever since I've gotten out of IT my desire to play with things in the house has increased - so I've been looking into little gadgets like this.
It might not be a home brewed solution, but for under $200 it's cheap enough for me!
For added protection, pick up the liquid sensor and put it in a low spot on the basement - if a pipe bursts, it'll email you and let you know.

(The usual note: I don't work for them. I just think it's a neat product and I haven't seen anything near it's price range that does the same stuff)

Just saw this advertised in a magazine at lunch:

Weather Duck.

It needs a PC to run its software but seems to fit your bill, especially SNMP for MRTG. I would imagine any old junky PC would be just fine.