On 17 July 2015 at 18:13, Adam Bower adam@thebowery.co.uk wrote:
I'd suggest that the thing you *really* want to monitor is neither the door or the power. If there is some doubt about what the problem is you want to measure the temperature (and probably the door and power too).
Agree that temperature would be the ideal property to monitor. However I have looked at wireless monitors without finding anything that looked much good (especially if I wanted to get the data out into something else). A wired sensor would be OK but I'm not sure about the effect that might have on the door seal and whether it might exacerbate any issue I have with the door potentially not shutting properly. But in principle a temperature measurement would be preferable.
I would suggest the really easy way to do this is get a computer, get a temp sensor, get some kind of energy monitor and something that can read open/shut for the door and graph it all with a tool like munin or nagios and then set some alerts on that if you really want.
Alerts are the most important point, as aside from the first few days after setting it up I'm not going to be interested enough to go and look at pretty graphs of my freezer temperature - especially given they really shouldn't vary very much if the thermostat is doing its job!
I don't have any experience with Munin, and the experience I had with Nagios wasn't positive (too complicated to set something simple up). I'm leaning towards the IoT approach where I could have lots of things "tweeting" their status and something else "following" them and reacting to changes. I *think* IFTTT would be a candidate for this but I could be wrong.