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Easy to use Household Temperature Monitor?
Jim Carroll asks: "I awoke this morning to a gas furnace that conked out. The house was 60F. We had to turn the switch off and on to get it working again. Fair enough -- but I'm worried about it going off when I'm travelling and having the pipes freeze. I'm looking for an inexpensive, simple to use temperature monitor/sensor that would plug into a USB port, that would then log household temperature to a server, so that I can view it through my broadband connection while travelling. Sure, there are all kinds of complex X10 solutions; there seems to be a few kits out there; and some high end industrial applications, but these all involve spending a few hundred dollars. I want simple, straightforward, cheap -- plug it in, and it dumps the temp every few minutes to a file. But there doesn't seem to be anything that is simple, $10-20, that is consumer oriented? And if not, why aren't companies yet making this type of device?"
Get an alarm system from ADT. They have all kinds of monitoring as 'value added' services. Things like CO, basement water sensors, temp sensors, fire sensors, smoke sensors, and intruder alert sensors. I'm sure you could build an open source LINUX solution with USB, serial, parallel, and apt-get.
Or, have a neighbor pop over and check once a day.
Depending on your house, the pipes *inside* your house may be more likely to freeze. The outside ones *should* be buried far enough below the frost line. I lived in an older house that had been retrofitted for indoor plumbing. It had a bathroom the size of a bedroom because, surprise, it used to *be* a bedroom! The pipes were run up through a not-well-enough-insulated outside wall. The landlady had said that I should leave a faucet dripping during the colder parts of the winter, but I didn't believe her. It seemed like such a crime to waste one of the planet's more scarce resources. Pretty soon I gained an incredible amount of sympathy for folks who don't have it like we do.
For the record, the inside temperature (at the thermostat, at least) was about 65 degrees when the pipes were frozen. This had happened before to earlier tenants, so there was a small access opening cut into the wall space where the pipes ran. I had to cram a hairdryer in and run it intermittently over the course of about an hour before the water started flowing again. By the way, we're talking about the edges of Zones 5 & 6 here. Not exactly North Dakota.
After that, I reluctantly left the tap on with just the slightest drip, and that was enough. Moving water doesn't freeze as easily. That winter got even colder for a while, but the pipes never froze again. Needless to say, I didn't renew my lease. Ah, campus slumlords.
A lot of motherboards have a two-pin header where you can attach a thermistor. Here's some how-to on it. Instead of sticking the thermistor to the inside of the PC, run it outside the box. Now you have a PC thermometer. There is plenty of free software like Motherboard Monitor that you can use to grab the temperature from within your own program.
I agree. Unless the pipes are fully insulated the entire length, they can freeze regardless of the temperature in the house. A lot of times kitchen sinks are on exterior walls, so those pipes will be the first to freeze.
Or go simple, look up aag electronics, by the Temp module (which is iButton) and go from there
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Oops, let me put that in a proper URL.
Indeed.
I recently had a house for sale in Salt Lake City. I still had the utilities on so I could use the place while fixing things, etc. I left the thermostat at 42F, figuring that a 10-degree buffer from the freezing point would be sufficient. It worked like a charm, in spite of several hard freezes before the place sold.
This, of course, doesn't address the real question: what if the heating systems fails? Depends on the climate, location of pipes, and construction of the house. The house I sold was 1925 brick rambler, with a large south-facing wall with many large windows. Given the sunny nature of Utah, it would take several days of sub-freezing temps for the house to cool to the point of busting the pipes.
I currently live in a 1908 Victorian-style (frame) fixer-upper (pretty leaky, drafty, etc.). We have the thermostat set to about 60 at night, and we've had the water run to our bathroom tub (just the tub, not the sink or the toilet) freeze on us several times, but not bust.
DLP-TEMP 2-Channel Temperature Acquisition Board
They provide C++ and VB Code examples. Pretty simple stuff, apparently this will show up as a COM port. The VB code is funny, it has all the c++ code in it commented out and you can see their porting thought process.
good luck
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage