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?"

Comments

Or...

[mjpaci]

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.

Use the motherboard's monitoring ability

[kawika]

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.

Re:K.I.S.S.

[jpmkm]

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.

Re:Dallas Semiconductor

[CharlieG]

Or go simple, look up aag electronics, by the Temp module (which is iButton) and go from there

Re:pipe wrap

[Parsec]

Oops, let me put that in a proper URL.

USB based temp sensor board = $35

[malakai]

I googled for 'usb temp sensor' and this was the 6th results
DLP-TEMP 2-Channel Temperature Acquisition Board

As seen in Nuts & Volts Magazine
Monitor and log digital temperature data from 1 or 2 sensors (one DS18B20 sensor included with purchase of board)
USB 1.1 Compliant
12F629 microcontroller can be reprogrammed with user code (requires programmer)
Rev 2 silicon from FTDI
No in-depth knowledge of USB required
Call or email DLP Design for volume pricing

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