Moteino prevents frozen weekend home

[joelucid]

Here in Germany it's been very cold since the new year started. When we came back from our christmas vacation I noticed that the temperature in our weekend home which amongst other things I monitor using several Moteinos had gone below 5 celsius. Now that's when the heating system should have kicked in so something had gone wrong.

Next morning I drove up there and got someone to fix the problem. When I arrived the inside temp was around 0 degrees. So just around freezing!

Back then I looked at it as a minor annoyance. However this weekend friends of ours with a weekend house in the same area called to tell that their heating system similarly had broken down. Only they didn't have a monitoring solution and found all radiators burst from the freezing water. The floor heating system was also destroyed and they had major water damage to the furniture as well. Overall damage many thousand dollars.

That's when I fully realized that Moteino just saved me a couple thousand bucks. Thanks Felix!

In any case this should be a good story for any partner who might consider excessive play with Moteino's a "waste of time" 

Joe

   

[oric_dan]

Excellent! :-)

[Sergegsx]

Great story, thanks for sharing!

[WhiteHare]

That's a fun story. 

Where I live we put foam "faucet protectors" over the outdoor water spigots to protect them against freezing in the winter.  While clearly better than nothing, I've been curious as to just how well they actually work, because from time to time we do get hit by windy below freezing temperatures (maybe 15F, -9.4C).  The lowest temperature on record for the region was -2F (-18.9C) in 1949.  I think someday I'll put some accurate temperature sensors in them just to see how close to freezing it gets in there.  If there's good margin I'll forget about it, but if it looks like it may be getting close to freezing, I'd probably upgrade the insulation to better withstand a worst case scenario.  It only has to prevent burst pipes just once, and then it has easily paid for itself.  For that reason, I could imagine using them that way over the long term if it turns out the temperature margin is thin.  I could let them sleep most of the time and only activate their reporting when ambient temperatures are getting cold.

[TomWS]

That's when I fully realized that Moteino just saved me a couple thousand bucks. Thanks Felix!

Felix will accept PayPal for renumeration... 

[TomWS]

Where I live we put foam "faucet protectors" over the outdoor water spigots to protect them against freezing in the winter.

Aren't your spigots 'frost proof'?  Most sillcocks these days are 'frost proof', where the actual valve and water supply is several inches inside the wall/foundation/crawlspace, and there is simply a long stem reaching to the outside handle.   Of course, for these to work, the spigot has to be disconnected and drained (something my neighbor in TX neglected to do - he also closed both sides of his irrigation backflow preventer causing those pipes to split in a relatively mild freeze). 

Tom

[Felix]

That's when I fully realized that Moteino just saved me a couple thousand bucks. Thanks Felix!
Joe

That's so great, thanks for sharing the story. While it was Moteino in this case, it could have been anything else, so I feel I humbled it was actually Moteino saving the day, makes me feel good that it is capable of doing really useful things. Any chance for photos of your mighty saver setup?

[joelucid]

Any chance for photos of your mighty saver setup?

Here are some photos of my weekend home setup:

The gateway (Pi2 with Moteino):


The outside thermometer running on 2xaaa lithium:


Two example inside thermometers:



The heater controller. It can switch heating profiles remotely so the house is warm when we arrive in winter. This was the initial motivation:


The bathroom fan controller which doubles as burst wake up sender for listen mode. Fan is automatically controlled based on absolute humidity differences between bathroom and rest of the house:


As I measure temperatures and humidity inside and outside I can make intelligent decisions about when to pull in dryer air from the outside. If the air outside is dryer on an absolute humidity basis than inside I switch this on using the rf-plug:


Also fans and lights can be automatically controller via these plugs:


This mote gives an alarm if water leakage occurs:


Here the water thermometer in its habitat:


And the garage door controller. This switches a 3 phase current motor using 5 relays. It has two Hall effect sensors detecting door position:



And to end on the disgusting side here's the sewage pit level sensor. Disgusting to install but good not to have to mess with the pit afterwards:


The heating system actually failed a few more times. It could always be solved by pushing the reset button on the heater. So the second time I just installed a Moteino in there that can push reset remotely. Problem solved.

Joe

[Felix]

Very cool, thanks!
Are these in an imgur album where we could see larger versions?

[joelucid]

Too small huh / that's what you get for doing this on an iPhone in a car. I'll see what I can do to post larger images.