Learned my lesson after a trip last week… I have sensors for nearly everything, but somehow totally forgot about the Fridge / Freezer.
A power outage made my fridge lose it’s mind and turn off cooling, even after it powered back up. Unplug / replug seems to have fixed it, but all the food was spoiled when we got home. Simple $10 temperature sensor could have saved everything!
Would you put the sensor itself inside the fridge/freezer, and would it still have signal?
My Aqara sensor has a pretty good signal in my fridge, results may vary as the material of fridges vary.
Cheers!
Flood/water sensors:
- Hot water heater
- Under kitchen sink
- Behind dishwasher
- Under clothes washer
Smart valve on mains water supply so you can automatically cut off water to the entire house if any of your leak sensors alert.
If you live in a climate in which you need to winterize your outdoor faucets (e.g. by shutting a valve in your basement, crawlspace, or garage) a temperature sensor on the warm side of the valve can save you from a flood.
I had to replace the garage door opener one winter and failed to notice a new quarter inch gap at the bottom of the garage door. Combine that with a cold snap and the garage dropped below freezing for long enough to burst pipes.
Fortunately I had a Shelley flood sensor on the floor so I was alerted fairly early and was able to avoid serious damage, but had I been paying attention to the pipes themselves I could have avoided a plumber call-out on Christmas Eve!
If anyone has other suggestions for possible ‘blind spots’ like this, appreciate it!
Water sensor near your washing machine.
And a smart speaker connected to HA in the bedroom to play a alarm once the smoke detector goes off.
I’ve yet to experience a smoke detector quiet enough that I couldn’t hear it throughout my entire house
I’ve been wanting to do this for awhile after having problems with the cooling coils freezing over. My question is, what sensor would you use for this? A battery-powered one would need to be recharged and a wire running into the fridge would break the seal
I bought a battery-powered (2xAAA) zigbee temperature/humidity sensor about 6 months ago and haven’t replaced its batteries yet.
A battery powered ZigBee one should last for at least a year…
Might be a dumb question since I have no experience with sensors. What would you have been able to do if the received an alert while you were out of town is the sensor able to turn the fridge off and on? Is that what you meant by “simple $10 temperature sensor could have saved everything”?
You could then call a friend or family member and ask them to check on it.
Or if you had it on a smart outlet you could try rebooting it.
You could then call a friend or family member and ask them to check on it.
This is exactly what I had in mind.
Fridge is probably one of the few things I’m hesitant to put on a smart outlet, just because chance of something going wrong with it.
A lot of smart outlets develop problems over time from the inductive surge current on electric motor startup (air conditioner, fridge, dehumidifier). The current ratings in ads are generally for resistive loads. Inductive load limits can be 30% less.
Since I’ve started automating stuff I’ve got myself an Acurite wireless fridge and freezer thermometer (initially found out about it on Reddit, before it all went to shit and all). It both has a nice magnetic display and it transmits in 433MHz band, so a SDR dongle plugged into my Home Assistant machine can receive the temp readouts. So far it didn’t prevent any disasters, but at least I know how hot it needs to get for the fridge to start having trouble keeping cool.
I also went this route. I’ve definitely had better luck with the Acurite sensors than I’ve had with Zigbee/ZWave sensors in terms of update frequency.
