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How to Protect a Home When Away in Winter?
kidMike writes "I have just accepted a new job in another state, requiring me to relocate. I'm going to keep my house in New England. As I watch the winter storm problems and electrical outages across the country, how do Slashdotters protect their houses (or cabins) when they are away in the winter? Is there a device that will call me if the temp in the house drops below a certain level? How about a broken pipe flooding the house? How can I keep advised of problems happening hundreds of miles away? (There will still be broadband at the house.)"
So, just rent your house out for a few months. Let the tenants phone you if there are any issues.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Friend or relative you can trust. I sincerely hope you are not looking for a technological solution, because I left the autonomous robotic house minders and the holographic repair people in my other pants.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
I would of thought most Slashdotters would prefer to protect their home with either a few Tesla coils or Prism towers. A Mammoth tank left behind can be advisable when your away base-raping however the airfield should normally be able to take care of any surprise threats.
That's one easy step anyway...
Option 1: Set up a web cam pointed in your living room, and put a thermometer in view. Then you'll see if there's a broken pipe, and you can read the thermometer.
Option 2: get to know your neighbor.
My friend doubt one of the nokia cellular cameras and it runs off the mains with a rechargable battery. You can text it to send you a picture of your home at any time, it will also send you a picture when the power is disconnected and when there is motion. Cool little thingy.
Find some nice family willing to live there for the winter.
And remember: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
I know its not technical and nor does it have a wow factor or allow you to log into a web based control and monitoring page in the "interweb", but how about asking a friend / neighbour to keep an eye on it for you? That way if something goes wrong they may be able to help you sort out any problems without you coming back, plus they are more flexible, able to deal with the weather, any break-ins, any mail that doesn't get misdirected or anything else for that matter.
Obviously the issue here, and it a big one, is Trust.
Do not ONLY shut the water off, drain the lines as well. You can also leave one faucet on a lower level open very slightly (after shutting the water off to allow room for expansion as well.
I usually don't like advertising a site, but just about everything you are looking to do can be done with stuff found on www.smarthome.com. From automatic water-pipe cut-off devices, to intricated temperature and environmental controls. Just look around. It can and will get expensive, but the water-pipe cut-offs are worth it the first time they engage and stop a problem before it is a problem.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Is there a device that will call me if the temp in the house drops below a certain level? How about a broken pipe flooding the house? How can I keep advised of problems happening hundreds of miles away?
Well, you could tell your neighbours that you're going away and ask them to check in on everything every once in a while.
Granted this isn't a high-tech proposal, but it would probably be effective.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
We use a device from this company to monitor our data centers for power, temperature and water intrusion.
http://www.sensaphone.com/
This should work, but you still need a trusted indevidual locally to handle any problem that came up.
Seriously, http://misterhouse.sourceforge.net/ Automate your home. I'll agree more with the above poster though, rent it out.
Throw in a subscription to WoW and I'll look after your house as long as you like
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
I usually set up a series of pits and snares and then stock secret rooms with orcs and kobolds. It doesn't hurt to circulate rumors of a powerful demon living in the cellar in local taverns either.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Buy an old P-III tower for 50 bucks, set it up with Fedora Core 6, Apache, and a dynamic DNS service. Add a cron job to reboot the server every Sunday, and maybe enable LogWatch to email you daily status updates. Finally, place the tower on the bare concrete in your basement.
With this set up you can check on your house from anywhere at any time. If the server stops responding, your house has been destroyed.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
Just to reiterate this, make CERTAIN you drain your pipes COMPLETELY if you're going to shut them off...just shutting them off is incredibly stupid advice that my family followed one winter. We came home to a complete disaster. Pipes burst in multiple places, we had no water for days, and it would've cost a fortune if we didn't have connections to a plumber that someone knows personally. Remember: water expands when frozen, so this isn't as much of an issue if you leave your heating on (which will cost a lot of money unnecessarily).
My first thought would be to setup webcams in every room watching doors, windows, sinks... thermometers... et cetera and setup a PC to stream them out somehow.
Dammit, by the time I submitted my post I realized I forgot to finish adding that bit. Also take note of the types of pipe in your home. Hard plastic PVC/CPVC pipes get very brittle with the cold and will tend to split in multiple places, having several faucets left open after draining the pipes can help prevent pipes splitting in areas that may hold water even after draining. Copper pipe, depending on type (type = thickness), has a better resistance to freezing and splitting, but a hard freeze in a copper pipe will split it open just as easy as a hard plastic pipe. Again, drain and leave faucets open. Soft plastic pipes, like Polybutylene, can actually withstand a hard freeze to a point, but if enough of the pipe freezes when full of water they can "blow" off the fittings on the pipe from the expansion. You can get by with draining these pipes and not having to leave any faucets on.
The most sure fire way is to burn it.
...I'm sorry, what were we talking about again?
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Well, aside from two dead bodies, the hotel was in good shape. I'd rather have "REDRUM" on a door than a burst pipe, I say.
I have freaks! I did something right...
But plenty of people winterize cabins for the winter. I would contact the state extension office for booklets on the subject.
I know that you have to shut off the water, some people put plywood on the windows. Some people put a minimal amount of heat to avoid sub freezing temps inside the house itself.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Get to know his neighbor? In person?? You must be new here.
How about a broken pipe flooding the house? ... (There will still be broadband at the house.)
Given the potential for there not to still be broadband at the house should the modem be sitting in a few inches of water/have water run through the closet it's in/etc. you may want to consider having whatever data the house outputs get stored elsewhere.
That way, when you check and get no signal, you can get a pretty good idea of what happened right up to the loss of signal rather than find, "hmm, the house is off the net, I'd better buy a plane ticket to find out nothing more than my ISP sucks."
Similarly, you may want to leave a key with a trusted neighbor who can go in and restart any crappy consumer grade gear that's managed to lock itself up.
In short, broadband's a wonderful thing but it's not as "always on" as you'd want for being able to monitor things from a distance.
I'm sure there are plenty of nerdy tools to monitor temp, humidity, etc., just don't use them in place of human beings. You should still loan a set of keys to someone you trust to check it every few days. Sensors and software don't have intelligence to understand what's happening or anticipate a problem before it happens (such as an ice storm knocking out your power, leading to other failures, etc.)
The truly enlightened person would not care about material possessions. As such, it is better to protect yourself than you possessions.
Not sure if this would help http://www.liquidbreaker.com/ but it has an internet connection, allows you to monitor the water from afar, as well as monitor temperature of water pipes
I took a few weeks off work, and returned to find my favorite geek website had replaced its standard content with content completely unrelated to the topics which used to make it great. Even more disturbing was the fact that no one else seemed to notice.
What should *I* do?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Shutting off the water is just the first step. Open the lowest tap and let the system drain. Fill the drain traps and toilets with antifreeze solution so they don't freeze up and crack. I don't know how you heat your place but gas furnaces and water heaters have a "vacation" setting so check your heat sources. A couple of light timers would be handy to make the place look lived in. You should also check with your insurance company as many policies state that the dwelling must be occupied to be insured, or at least checked by a responsible person daily. Don't forget to let your mailman, paperboy and local cop know that you are going to be gone for a while. Good luck with your endeavors.
If you're worried about bursting pipes (which you should be - it's an incredible expense if it goes and runs for days or weeks). The best solution is to keep it heated and you can do that easily without electricity, assuming you have either natural gas or propane.
Buy a blue-flame wall-mount heater and have it professionally installed by a plumber. It is a 100% efficient heater that runs off of propane or natural gas and uses a manually-sparked pilot light. You can adjust the manual thermostat mostly which is pretty unsophisticated - e.g. low to high - and it'll cycle on and off depending upon need.
We've done that ever since a bad ice storm took our power out for a week and now that we live on a farm, it's even more important. Plus, the 100% efficient heating is a nice supplement to less efficient furnaces. Put them on the lowest level of a home - e.g. the basement - as heat rises. It makes a nice supplement for heating basements too incidentally.
The small versions are well under $100 and don't take a lot of time to install if you're going into an unfinished basement. For not much more, the big units really cut your electric heating costs and pay for themselves usually in 1-2 years since your regular forced air furnace has to run a lot less (and at best, they're less efficient).
I suggest leaving your youngest child at home to take care of the place. Leave adequate supplies, like paint buckets, firecrackers, cardboard cutouts of famous people, some 1950s gangster films (that you wouldn't let him watch otherwise), a tarantula, and a blowtorch. That should take care of everything.
Many insurance policies won't cover unoccupied houses. Check with your agent and secure additional coverage if necessary. And hire somebody to look after your house. For money. With well defined responsibilities, like checking the house every k days and keeping a record.
Call a plumber experienced with winterizing vacation homes. Install a monitored alarm and have a friend setup as a contact. Try a construction/home maintenance forum.
they're not amazingly cheap, but they use an ordinary phone line, keep calling til acknowledged, are battery backed... they're only meant to monitor power and temperature, but i'm sure you could interface something else if needed.
You need HomeSaver See http://www.qsystemsengineering.com/ Dr. Null
In the book the hotel blew up.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
There are several basic steps that you can use to winterize an unoccupied house. Shutting off the water supply is one good idea. There are also chemicals you pour into drains that will stay in the traps without evaporating and keep sewage fumes and critters from entering the house. Shuttering the windows would also be smart.
If you have shut off the water than keeping the house above freezing may not be absolutely necessary. Allowing it to get too cold might cause other problems with lumber shrinking and with water that's stuck in the pipes freezing. I recommend you have several electric heaters plugged in with their thermostats set to the minimum; that way if the house gets too cold, or if your main heater fails, they'll kick in and keep things from going below zero centigrade.
As for remote monitoring, I'd recommend using a more old-fashioned approach; disable call-answering if you have it, and get an old fashioned answering machine. Then call it once per day. If it picks up, great; if not, either the electric or the phone line is down.
Queue up Home Alone on Netflix, dude. Assuming you've got a kid (and yes, I realize that this is Slashdot, so that's quite an assumption), your best bet is to "accidentally" leave your kid at your house when you leave town. The benefits are substantial:
the JoshMeister on Security
Yeah, except for the whole part where the boiler blew, reducing the whole hotel into rubble (the book was better than the movie).
Granted if your house is really haunted by an evil power, that may be a good thing...
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
We have two old (1913) non-winterized summer homes that are empty 9 months out of the year. Nothing's fool proof, but we, and our neighbors with neighboring cottages, haven't had any really huge problems in, well about 60 years, and since all seven cottages that are contemporaries of ours are still there, apparently nothing cottage-ending has occurred in 90+ years.
Turn off the water. Open the taps and drain the system backwards from the lowest point. Flush the toilets. Unscrew the j-traps under the sinks and dump them.
Empty, unplug, open, and defrost the fridge/freezer.
Shut off the power at the primary circuit breaker.
Buy a rubbermaid container and put any liquids you're leaving at the house in it- shampoo, 409, drain cleaner, liquid soap, batteries, whatever.
Unplug everything from all the wall outlets.
Lock up.
Keep your roof in good repair. Don't wait for it to start leaking before you replace it, just replace it every 15 years or whatever. Keep an eye on it.
Find someone local who you trust, preferably a neighbor or someone whose commute takes them past or right near the house and pay them a small fee to drive by the house and take a look once a week, and walk around it once a month. Even if they're a friend and insist that they'd be happy to look after your place, insist upon paying them something. It's only fair for their time, and it makes it more likely they'll take the obligation seriously.
There are no guarantees, but it works for us. We've only had one problem big enough to file an insurance claim over for one of the two cottages in 60 years. They're both in the woods and a tree fell on one. The property watcher noticed it the next day and the damages weren't too exorbitant.
Good luck. Install a burglar alarm.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
As a kid, our neighbors, who were getting up in age, began heading south every winter. They just gave my parents keys to the house in December when they left and trusted that we could take care of it if anything happened.
To facilitate this, he rigged up a 120v relay to a simple mercury thermostat. If the temperature in his basement dropped below 40--kept at 45 normally I think--a bright light would turn on in their bedroom window, which happened to face our house. It would be hard for us not to notice.
If the power went out, well, then our power was out also and we could go over and see if we needed to fire up the generator he kept in his garage or anything.
I'm sure something similar could be done to trigger a phone call. Just run the pushbutton leads through your mercury thermometer.
You could also install a managed or unmanaged security system that would alert you if doors or windows were opened. I'm sure some of these companies also have temperature sensors they can add.
I have to agree with the various posts that a technological solution is not going to fix all your problems. Even with a good alarm system and all kinds of fancy automation and webcams, there are some things that only a real person living in the place (or checking on it regularly) will be able to notice.
That having been said, here are some links to Linux Journal articles about doing various home-automation stuff. Perhaps if you implement these, along with a good alarm, and some relatives/friends help, you can have the peace of mind you need:
Home Automation using Python:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8513
Remote Temperature Monitoring:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8780
Automated Temperature Control:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9091
Better than paying someone else to house sit, rent the house. Instead of having an expense you get an added income. If you're worried about not being there while renting the house out, then hire a property management company. Or you could get some realty companies manage the property. And they aren't that expensive, the going rate is around 5% of the rent. Odf course you'll still have to pay for any repairs but even then the managers cannhire and work with whoever does the repair work. Another possibility is to House swap. This is where you find someone where you're going to who wants to go where you are. You live in their house while they live in yours.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I winterize my mountain cabin every year and since the late '60s have not had a problem. Considering that it gets to -40 or colder every winter in the mountains where it is, I know that things would freeze if I let them. The frost line is at least 2 feet below the surface too.
Turn off all the water at the mains. If you use a well, drain the lines, tank and pump. (You'll need to bring water when you return to prime the system but usually only 5 gallons or less is needed.) Usually a valve in or near your front yard will control the water to your home. Just turn it off. If you can't find it, there is also a valve in your home that does the same thing but, it is exposed.
Then drain everything that has water in it -- don't forget the hot water heater, toilet tanks, etc.
Pour a half bottle of antifreeze down the sinks, into the dishwasher, toilets, and other plumbing that can't be drained. If you are on Septic system, make sure you use an antifreeze product that won't kill your tank!!! Leave all the doors under sinks and such open to allow residual heat to get to the pipes.
Have a nice trip! Bring priming water with you or get some near by when you return. Turn on the power. If you're on a well, prime the pump and turn it on. Run the water for about 5 minutes on every faucet to flush the antifreeze away and clean the pipes and you're back to normal.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
OK, let me get this straight. A Stephen King novel... is better than a Stanley Kubrick movie starring Jack Nicholson pretty close to his prime. I find that hard to believe. I'll have to check it out some time. If it was better than finally seeing what Jack was typing, seeing REDRUM in the mirror, seeing that bolt open, and a generally bright setting made horrifying, then that book must be pretty good.
I have freaks! I did something right...
I've done this in northern Illinois before to perfect effect:
-Drain the pipes.
-If you can't drain pressure tanks or hot-water heaters put just enough electric heat on to keep the basement above freezing. (It doesn't take much.)
-Throw a splash of non-toxic "RV" antifreeze in the toilets (bowl and tank) and drains.
-Empty and turn off the refrigerator.
-Remove canned goods.
This takes a few hours to set up, and you can just let it freeze.
I spent a night in the hospital once when I was a kid because of a gas heater in the bathroom. It used up all the oxygen while I as taking a bath and I passed out.
I've read the book and seen the film, and the film is by far superior.
(But then, I would say that, wouldn't I.)
deus does not exist but if he does
I oversee the winteriztion of vacant homes 200 times a year or more. In five years I have never once had a problem If the work was done correctly and nobody tampered with the plumbing system. 1. Turn off power to your hot water heater. If you know what you are doing and can do so safely, physically remove the hwh breaker (or fuse). If not, put a piece of tape across the breaker which should now be in the off position. Turn off power to the well (if any) in the same fashion. Leave a reminder on the electric panel to ensure that you turn the water back on BEFORE you turn on the hot water heater. Turn off the gas valve to the hot water heater as an extra layer of protection - if you fire up your hwh before it has been refilled you are out one hwh. 2. Turn off the water supply to the house. Master valves on both sides of the water meters if you are on municipal water. (If you are on a well, once the power is off open a faucet and let your pressure tank run dry at this point - different than opening the valves in the step further down. If you don't do this you run the risk of losing your pressure tank which can cause your well to burn out. My house was sitting vacant for about 2 years before I bought it and this was a problem.) 3. Hook up a hose to the hwh and drain the water to your floor drain, sump pit or out the window. Opening the highest hot water valve in the house will help it drain quicker. 4. Open the lowest and highest cold water valves in the house to allow those pipes to drain 5. Using an air compressor, blow out the supply lines throughout the house. Any decent plumber can tell you how or google up some accurate information. 6. Scoop out as much water from toilet tanks as you can. 7. Get the *PINK* antifreeze (RV/Marine). Pour generous quantities into the toilet tanks, bowls, and down all of your drains. Pour some into your dishwasher and washing machine and run a partial cycle (no rinse) to get the antifreeze into the pumps and internal hoses. If you have a pool or hot tub you will need to take some additional steps, for the most part along these lines. Above ground pools and some in-ground pools without rigid covers get a large, inflatable air pillow floated in the middle to make the cover slope down towards the edges so the water and ice doesn't puncture a hole in the middle, gets some (but not all!) of the water drained and may or may not need plugs for the water intakes. Your miles may vary, consult a pro on these devices. If you have boiler, consult an expert. Draining water and/or filling with antifreeze is a bit involved and entirely inadvisable in some cases - I've seen many older systems go down for winterization then never come back up because of issues with old seals, corrosion and other nasties. If you have steam heat then things can become even more muddled about. Again, consult an expert. Finally, on your way out, hit the power to the master breaker. When you return you will be able to restore power to the house and will be glad of the tape (or removed breakers) that serve as a reminder not to turn on the well or hot water heater until you are actually ready to do so. Turn off the gas/propane at the master valve.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"