New Fridge - setting up monitoring

| Someday, | items like refrigerators will contain an ethernet jack and can be remotely | monitored for abnormal conditions with ease.

Of course, you will have to pay a monthly fee to the monitoring service. The protocol used will not be available to the consumer for "safety reasons".

| In the next house, we'll have | an autostart generator,

I'm working on this now. I told the propane company that I wanted a remote tank level indicator in the house. They said they had a great service where I could check my tank level on the Internet. I explained that I wanted a wire from the tank to a box in the house that showed the level and had alarm contacts for low level. (I even showed them some sample devices in catalogs.) They said they could program their "modem" to call me when my tank was low. I said that I didn't want to involve their "modem" at all. They said I shouldn't worry about it because something could always be done after the tanks were installed. I pointed out that the nice monitor device in the catalog supported only two of the four popular tank gauge fittings (not including snap-in) so it would really be better to work this out before the tanks were in the ground, especially since I'm buying the tanks.

It's been several weeks and still no quote. :(

Dan Lanciani ddl@danlan.*com

expect an outlandish bid, in effect telling you that they don't want to do the job. i own my own tank and call around for quotes before every fill, which has saved me hundreds of dollars. i did find someone who will match any fill quote from anyone in the area; unfortunately he didn't say that he's beat any quote.

Robert Green wrote: I am a home automation enthusiast. sounds like an understatement.

I'd like to hear more about the monitoring system as a whole.

I'd like to graph total electric power consumption. I use a Palm Pilot to count the IR pulses out of the power meter, but the newer palms that support bluetooth have the newer OS that doesn't support direct reading of the IR port. So it's not wireless. Then I got a BlueLine wireless power meter, but that doesn't support logging. I've never been able to determine the communication protocol or whether there's a pin inside that I can tap to log the data.

What's a good cheap method to log total consumption...emphasis on the cheap...free...?

Thanks, mike

Hmm, Automation system itself can fail too. Even if it had redundancy built-in. I'd rather depend on my ears, eyes, hands and common sense. Also house insurance covers for spoiled food in case of break down.

When I'm traveling, I have much better things to think about than what the temp and operating efficiency of my fridge is. Do you have $20K worth of food in that fridge? So, if I lose $200 worth of food, big deal. Guess what. In 40+ years, living in many houses and apartments, it has happened exactly one time. That was when I was in college and since it was a dorm fridge, the college even paid us for the lost food. And it's not exactly a bad thing either, as when u clean out the freezer, probably 20% of the food has long been forgotten and should have been chucked long ago.

On the other hand, what's the cost, time, and maintenance involved in placing multiple monitors on a refrigerator over 40 years? How often do the sensors and other parts of the system fail compared to the fridge? In my experience, home electronics is far less reliable than the fridge.

Nah, there are people who have systems that astound me. They log everything that happens - from all details of the weather to the daily consumption of water, gas, electricity, etc. One gent in California had a solar heating and power system that even opened and closed casement windows automatically according to the weather conditions.

Not if you want to do it on the cheap. In the search for a "magic bullet" I've bought a lot of bullets and very few of them were magical except in the holes they put in my VISA balance.

The Kill-o-Watt provides a visual indicator and a reference but I do datalogging with old Radio Shack PC-interface meters and old, low power consumption laptops like a Dell Crapitude with broken hinge running a very old version of the Ratshack recording software (actually developed by a company called Metex).

The laptop is hooked up in the basement just below the fridge with a 30' ft. serial cable I used to use Fastwire and LapLink with (before LANs were reasonably priced). Real time monitoring is done through a power strip that has the conductors separated and a home-brew "current sensor" (a few turns of wire wrapped around one of the conductors) running into a CPU-XA that can send alarms or take actions based on preset analog values.

Calibration of that was done using a strip of 8 porcelain lamp sockets and combinations of 25, 40, 60 and 100 watt bulbs so I could simulate the draw of various wattages. The Kill-O-Watt is very useful for knowing the exact number but basically I will set the new fridge up by making sure that the starting up current draw won't trip the alarm, but eight 100 watt light bulbs do. (Shut up about your solenoids, "Doc" - it's my hobby!)

There's nothing wireless about my current setup except the Chaney fridge thermometer. I will be installing my own digital temperature sensors in the freezer compartment by going in through the unused water line for the icemaker option that I declined.

I "fight" continuously with makers of home automation equipment to convince them that data logging is an important part of home monitoring. Well, for me, anyway. (-:

Ah yes, I see you've been searching for the magic bullet, too. I've been very disappointed by the number of proprietary protocols in devices like wireless thermometers. Like remote controls, there's only moderate agreement about how things should be done.

Stuff like monitoring the fridge is really just a curiosity. Since there are no "blood tests" to see if a fridge is sick, I want to monitor whatever conditions I can to see if I can determine when it's in need of cleaning or when something's out of whack. Someday they will come with a little LED like on my central vac that goes from green to yellow to red as it fills up telling you the coils need cleaning.

This newer GE is far better sealed off from dirt that the 30+ Whirlpool it's replacing. Anyway, I'm just curious to monitor the life cycle of the fridge to see what is revealed. While I am it, it seems logical to try to prevent or at least alert me to certain modes of failure, as someone suggested, a horn that sounds when the door's been open longer than a few minutes.

As noted in a previous message, once I have enough readings about power usage, temperature of the backplate, internal compartments and ambient room temperature, I am going to try placing a custom made filter over the openings in the bottom of the unit where dusty air is likely to enter. I am afraid that by lowering the airflow to the compressor by filtering it I will shorten its life or even burn it out. The data I collect running it filter-free will allow me to compare the two states to help decide whether it's useful to filter or not. As someone else pointed out, it's a lot easier to pop an old filter out and a new one in that it is to get all the dust off the innards once it has built up. Since it's always moist from condensation, dust and hair can matte up into a mighty sticky, very "uggy" plaster on the surface of the coils, lowering their heat transfer capability significantly.

No cheap, free that I know of, although there are suitable broken hinged laptops and new and used PC interface meters on Ebay all the time for less than $100 combined. There are, I am sure, people who will be able to suggest cheaper methods - mine is just what evolved.

-- Bobby G.

(crossposted in comp.home.automation and alt.home.repair)

We can only hope that "open standards" will prevail but I have my doubts. I read a news item about Intuit just completely screwing over its users who it had migrated to the "cloud" and only providing a data converter when hounded by thousands of irate loyal customers. I wonder when the first national cloud computing disaster will occur. Critical business data stored and managed off-site by who knows who or what working from where? Yeah, I'll do that. (-:

It would be great if all home appliances (and maybe even cars) had a LAN jack and all basic setup functions and data analysis could be performed with a web browser. It really is a great modular design and all the standards are already in place.

When I first started to install CCTV around the house that I wanted to be able to see over the internet, the vendors all proposed solutions involving running all access through servers in China with javascript and all sorts of other security holes enabled. Uh uh. No way.

That's a clear indication your salesmen is way outside his comfort zone. If you pester him he might eventually find someone up the food chain that knows about these things, but you'd really have to pester him. Sounds like they want your remote access device installed *afterward* so they can blame any problems (which will most likely be related to their inexperience with the device) on you.

You can tell the pioneers by the numbers of arrow stuck in their backs. (0-:

-- Bobby G.

battery-backed

battery-backed

You aren't implying that just because safety systems can fail, they shouldn't be used, are you?

You can't really hear a bad compressor all the way across the country, can you? I'd like to be able to check my home's critical equipment when I am away on travel so that there aren't any unpleasant surprises when I get home. Same with dust on the coils. Getting down on my hands and knees to check for dust bunnies was something I might have done when I had two working knees, but facing two TKR's now it's a real issue to deal with anything that far down. Even with an inspection camera on a stalk there's still the faceplate that has to be removed. If I can tell the coils are clogging up by some other means, then my knees will be very much the happier for it.

But the biggest reason to do it? Curiosity. I want to know if the appropriate sensors *can* give me a heads up on incipient failure. One of my first jobs was doing quality control at a photofinisher and the test strips, PH readings and other diagnostics often saved thousands of dollars in reworked or ruined jobs. One disgruntled employee kept tossing copper pennies in the color developer tank, which made it impossible to get good colors in the printing process. It was easy to spot, even though the penny was at the bottom of a six foot tall, 4 foot wide tank filled with rollers, because of the change in the test strips we ran 3 times a day. Since then I've been sold on process monitoring, even with something as simple as a refrigerator.

My deductible would just about make filing a claim a total waste of time. Most likely, it would raise my rates or give my insurer a reason to cancel me.

Many of the refrigerator issues I've had over the years wouldn't have happened with a redundant sensor system in place. These include the dog opening the fridge door and yanking out stuff that blocked it open (here come the "kill the dog" remarks from the heavy breathing Neanderthals), my loading the freezer too full and not noticing the door hasn't closed, going away without realizing the lack of opening and closing the door would drop the refrigerator compartment to below freezing, having a blocked drain back up condensate into the coils and freezing into a solid block, having the fridge pop the GFI circuit it used to be plugged into,. etc.

I suppose it's just Usenet but it still surprises me at how many people are concerned about how *I* choose to spend my time and resources as if it was hurting them in some way. No offense meant, Tony. You were at least civil in your comments. That's rare. But if you look back to threads like the one about cabinet safety latches, people were not shy or civil in expressing profound contempt for the way someone had decided they wanted to handle childproofing.

I appreciate your concern about system failures, but since this is a "bolt on" that in no way affects the system it is monitoring, there's really nothing to worry about. It the monitors fail, I am back to where I started from.

-- Bobby G.

LOL. I could imagine.

With a food budget of $10 a week, ice cream was like frozen gold. I remember eating lots of Rice-a-Roni at 37 cents a box which was also the price of a gallon of gasoline. Tuna could be had, four cans for a dollar, if you shopped the sales which was a given with a $10 budget. Things changed dramatically, though, when I became a short order cook and later, a pizza wrangler.

-- Bobby G.

I assume this fully sensored and 24/7 monitored fridge is the same one you asked for input about in the other thread? Where you indicated you will be moving soon and leaving it behind?

With so many fridges it's odd the rest of us haven't died from food poisoning from failure to put in 6 sensors and a couple of PCs to continuously monitor and log our fridge. As for food storage and recalls due to contamination, they are two very different things.

| going | away without realizing the lack of opening and closing the door would drop | the refrigerator compartment to below freezing

I noticed this effect (i.e., that I was part of the temperature regulation) on my previous KitchenAid refrigerator (which replaced an in retrospect far superior 1959 Tappan). The temperature controls also required tweaking from season to season apparently to account for ambient temperature. This puzzled me at first. I knew that only the refrigerator section was thermostatically controlled (relying on the compressor to run enough to keep the freezer section frozen) but you would think that this would at least result in, like, you know, regulating the temperature in the refrigerator section.

I eventually decided that the problem was that the thermostat in the refrigerator section was in the air path from the freezer section, so if you set it such that the desired steady-state temperature was maintained it would take a very long time to get there, perhaps never getting there if you opened the door from time to time. On the other hand if you set it to keep the temperature where you wanted with the door opening occasionally it would freeze as you noticed when you weren't there to open the door.

I bought a Sub-Zero which uses a completely separate cooling system for freezer and refrigerator. This works very well, but I still wonder how the old Tappan managed to do the same job with only one compressor. As far as I remember it did not blow air from the freezer into the refrigerator and I think there were coils in both sections, so perhaps it diverted freon according to need. Systems to run multiple evaporators from one condenser (not one outdoor unit with multiple condensers) are starting to show up in mini-splits so this general kind of thing seems possible.

Dan Lanciani ddl@danlan.*com

I remember Krapt dinner, 10 boxes per dollar IIRC.

-- Bobby G.

regulation)

I haven't seen the seasonal affect, but as we travel for two or three days at a time, it's clear that we need to remember to turn the dial (expertly calibrated with a variable width line and no numerals), up when we leave and down when we're back. The GE holds the temperature at 38 without freezing when the door gets open even just a few times a day, but when no one touches it, it's frozen milk, tea and more.

thermostatically

You would think that, but for whatever reason, it's obviously not so. "There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity . . . The Refrigerator Zone."

It's not a good choice. I'd hate to have to add anything to the ever-growing "leaving the house checklist" (which I hope to someday automate with a voice that will even know when I am lying to it just to get it to shut up). But just like the Whirlpool before it, this GE *has* to be set back slightly if you keep the refrigerator below 40 degrees for normal use.

It may be just the way it's designed, although you would think that a freezer that dropped from 0 to -10 would be nowhere near as bad as a refrigerator compartment that dropped from 38 to 28 degrees. Maybe the voltage to the compressor increases when no one's home running lights or AC. That's something worth monitoring just because there are sometimes rolling brownouts at this time of year. I wonder what the various tech support people would say causes the problem of "vacation freezing."

Another thing I've found is a tremendous variance of internal temperatures. The veggie drawer is 10 degrees warmer than the shelf where the freezer exhausts into the refrigerator compartment. The right hand rear corner is the best place to keep the extra milk in - until it freezes.

I suppose if I dialed in remotely, I could turn off the fridge remotely via a relay on the cord if the lower compartment was freezing, but there would have to be about a year of reliability testing before that happened. (-:

refrigerator

You would have had to have heard a pretty noticeable clacking for it to switch coils, I would imagine. There's a very loud clack in the GE's startup routine (cold start from the wall plug) so maybe that's exactly how it's done.

Speaking of noises, a friend suggested that one of the most useful records I could have would be a simple microphone attached to the frame to record what he believes will be a unique sound signature. Since his lifetime was spent improving the MTBF figures on F-16's, I tend to agree. Just like Brit solex carbs, the sound a mechanical device makes says a lot about how it's operating (and yet so many people drive around with chirping brakes that turn into scraping ones!).

Did you ever look for the service manuals? I haven't for mine, but I think I am about to. Your comments about seasonal changes have reminded me that measure the internal and external humidity might be tell me more about what causes the seasonal drift. Now I know why I bought that web control device that's still sitting on the workbench with the two humidity sensors and all the other sensors I would need to monitor (and perhaps even correct) device behavior remotely. This is the perfect job for it.

The reason I know there's a fan inside is that when I opened the door with room humidity near 100% I saw a jet of condensation emanating from a square hole in the back at fan powered speed. .

Good luck with your propane sensor. I can only guess that part of their reluctance to call back has to do with propane disasters. I am sure they feel that by sticking to Henry Ford's "any color" theory, they are limiting problems down the line. Did they say what their modem package cost? You could probably piggy back on that although it seems a shame to have to kluge it like that. Maybe they'll give you the modem deal free if you call them back often enough. (-: I've been amazed at what persistence can achieve.

Time to search for the on-line manuals amid the dozens of scam and drive-by-downloading sites that target people looking for drivers, manuals and song lyrics. Maybe I'll just go to GE. I need an extra shelf, anyway. (Anybody notice how two liter bottles suddenly got taller?)

-- Bobby G.

Dual evaporator coil frig's turn the appropriate fans when needed. I been using a Samsung dualie model for six years now. (nice)

From what I been told, and have observed in real life, 10 to 12 years is the expected lifespan of most modern refridgerators. When the compressor intermitantly fails to start. Installing a 110v hard start kit, ~15$, will add a couple of years to the working lifespan.

"aemeijers" a écrit dans le message de groupe de discussion : KMmdnThNP85VkcfRnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com...

My fridge allready tell me the temp of both side in celsius or farenhight.. and guess what.. it has an alarm (local) if there is a long power faillure and temp goes higher then 56 it will buzz till acknoledge..

from there web page..

Alarm System Notifies you if there's been a power failure, if a door stays open longer than five minutes and if the interior temperature of the refrigerator ever rises above 56 degrees for more than 20 minutes.

source:

My wife love them fridge and stove).. me I just hope they will last long enough to pay them before I have to replace them.. ;-)

Have a look at ioBridge.com. Their monitoring can trigger emails alerts without monthly monitoring costs. Also no PC required! I have my modem and ioBridge connected to a UPS for monitoring my house. So far it hasn't been the power outages causing me trouble, but the lightning on the phones lines :)