# Fancy Temperature Monitoring



## OverStocked (May 26, 2007)

Wow. That is an awesome idea, and well priced. I think I am going to have to do this too. If only it connected to the network on WLAN. 

Where did you order from?

It looks like there is a wlan adapter.


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## Wasserpest (Jun 12, 2003)

I bought it from AmbientWeather (see link above). The Gateway plugs into your (broadband) router, I guess you could make it all wireless via some access point.

The only thing I don't like so far is that the gateway makes a high-pitched noise. Many people won't hear it, but I am a bit sensitive. Will need to find some way to block out the buzzing without blocking reception.


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## stripe157 (Jan 4, 2010)

Too cool. 
I love it!


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## plantbrain (Dec 15, 2003)

I think there's some application for heating the home, vs the energy to heat the tanks/personal comfort etc.

You can measure the difference between the tank and ambient vs the energy usage.

Takes a lot more heat energy to warm an aquarium that's in a room at 65F compared to 75F if the goal in the tank is 78F. You save heating the whle room/house etc, but the tank's heater is going nuts.

You can use more heaters etc during the winter or over build for that issue also. Still, the energy to keep tanks warmer during the colder months is a dramatic issue in terms of energy usage. More than light energy.

Regards, 
Tom Barr


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## Wasserpest (Jun 12, 2003)

Figuring out the heating vs cooling of tanks and house has been a big reason for me to set this up.

For example, my 250gal tank is "heated" by 6 T5HO bulbs. That heat needs to go somewhere... In Winter, it is channeled into a small, unheated room - saving the need to heat that one. In Summer, it will just vent into the garage/outside. 

Having the sensors makes it easier to determine how changes in venting or ambient temperatures affect the water temperatures. Two tanks in my office, both unheated, one running at 79 degrees, the other at 72. What's the difference? The hot tank uses higher light wattage, and better insulation, so it doesn't cool out at night when the room temps are down.

I have a 135 gal tank in an uninsulated garage, and only a 50W heater is needed to keep temps up. Why? Because the tank itself is insulated well. All plywood, styrofoam sheet covers up the front glass, tight fitting cover. Heating tanks is always easy. Cooling them is tricky.


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## Craigthor (Sep 9, 2007)

This is just plain sweet!


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## CL (Mar 13, 2008)

Very cool! I always love monitoring the weather too, so that's built into the unit. The fact that the sensors have temp. probes in addition to being able to monitor air temp is amazing. Plus it looks like you can monitor it on your phone?
Very cool.


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## Wasserpest (Jun 12, 2003)

I agree, those sensors are a good value. Monitoring humidity is another thing that can come in handy for us watery folks. One could add one to a riparium, reporting air and water temp along with the humidity. Just don't drown the sensor housing.

One of the screenshots above is a "mobile link" with the latest sensor data formatted for a smart phone screen. So you just pull up that link on your phone browser and bingo. Temps on the road. :icon_mrgr

What I have not figured out is how long they will collect data, in other words, how large the data file gets before it is either reset, or the oldest data drops off. I emailed them about that. Would be nice if you could reset that yourself.


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## tyler79durdan (Jan 23, 2010)

Great move! Nice tech! Looks like a few good, solid hours of enjoyment.


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## NJAquaBarren (Sep 16, 2009)

"While this won't tell you much, it provides me with lots of joy for many hours."

that statement gives me joy.


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## Wasserpest (Jun 12, 2003)

So this has been running without any issues for two weeks. I have collected just over 10000 records, each with two temperature and one humidity value, plus timestamp and location.

Works just great. I can see exactly what's going on where, how cold it has been last night, if I should call the wife to open the garage door, how waterchanges affect temperatures in my tanks. I switched fans, reduced the lighting period, dropped an ice cube, disconnected the pond waterfall, etc, and all is clearly visible in various graphs.










I created a couple of those, some just showing the daily highs and lows, some humidity values, etc. Usually I just look at the temps for the two past days plus the current one.

Rarely ever something works out as nicely as this did. Only issue so far is that data is just collected and collected, after a year I will have over a quarter million records, and downloading that will take a while. By then perhaps the novelty has worn out and I'll download only weekly or so.


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## epond83 (Feb 19, 2009)

For my home weather station i it set up to save data every two hours and it collects indoor and outdaor tempature and humitity, also barmetric pressure. Since the first of the year i have like 700 some data points and the file is about 40KB. So with your site thing they should be able to keeo a lot of data, this stuff seems to be formatted in a way to stay very small.


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## Wasserpest (Jun 12, 2003)

I have most sensors collect data every 10 minutes. So it is 6 (sensors) x 6 (samples per hour) x 24 (hours per day) x 365 (days per year) = 315,360 records with 946,080 sample points (2x temp and 1x humidity).

After just over two weeks the file has grown to 850k. So theoretically in a year it would grow to over 20MB which isn't impossible to download, just a bit of a drag because I download the same old, same old data over and over. I'd like to be able to either reset that data file, or specify where I only download say the last week or two days.

The tech service at WeatherDirect was pretty useless, they just repeat the same stuff over and over. 

Do I need a data point every 10 minutes? Maybe not, but Access can handle a few million records. And do you need a 15 Megapixel image from your camera?


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## crossbow (Nov 29, 2009)

> And do you need a 15 Megapixel image from your camera?


Yes. Because sometimes you just need to count every single scale on your fish. Just to make sure they're all still there. 

:fish:

Thanks for the link and review! Question: Can you set alerts? If that thing could email/txt you if the temperature suddenly spiked or dropped....oh man, that device would be worth it's weight 10 fold over.


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## fooledyas (Feb 22, 2010)

Hows the accuracy Ive had a lot of trouble with wireless temp gages


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## Wasserpest (Jun 12, 2003)

crossbow said:


> Yes. Because sometimes you just need to count every single scale on your fish. Just to make sure they're all still there.
> 
> :fish:
> 
> Thanks for the link and review! Question: Can you set alerts? If that thing could email/txt you if the temperature suddenly spiked or dropped....oh man, that device would be worth it's weight 10 fold over.


I hope you don't mind that I made a quick adjustment to your beautiful, yet distracting example. :wink:

You can set alerts! And have them emailed or texted to you. It is free for one year, and then like $9 a year iirc. I haven't activated this yet, but it might come in handy. I mean you could put a sensor in your fridge and have them text you if the temp goes over a certain threshold. Or if you have unreliable heaters in your tank, etc etc. 

Question though... what's its weight worth? :icon_smil



fooledyas said:


> Hows the accuracy Ive had a lot of trouble with wireless temp gages


It's pretty good actually. When I originally set them up, I put them all into one shelf next to each other, and over some time all their temps merged pretty close to +/- .5F. Nothing lab quality, but enough for our purposes. Remains to be seen how they perform long-term.


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## Wasserpest (Jun 12, 2003)

Looks like they cut the price of the gateway (which includes one sensor and a bonus weather station) down to $50 now, pretty affordable for what it does.

I am still almost daily updating my database, the download is now at 3MB. At some point I will have to delete the sensors and reconnect all of them to reset the file.

Except for one day-long outage this has been very reliable. I created an Excel macro that does some formatting, calculates a unique record identifier, and saves the file as a text file. In Access, I just have to run a query which appends the new records to a table, then I can run various Pivot Charts and whatnot to look at what's going on.


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## kcrossley (Feb 22, 2010)

So I take it these devices are not platform independent (PC vs Mac) and instead use some sort of Javascript application via a web browser, correct?


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## tuffgong (Apr 13, 2010)

Great find. An ideal setup for monitoring temps across multiple tanks. I will be getting one of these in the future.


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## Wasserpest (Jun 12, 2003)

kcrossley said:


> So I take it these devices are not platform independent (PC vs Mac) and instead use some sort of Javascript application via a web browser, correct?


You can see the status and recent measurements on any web browser. The collected data can be downloaded via a tab-separated file which opens in Excel. I don't see any specific requirements as to PC or Mac so I assumes it works with both.


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## Wasserpest (Jun 12, 2003)

Arghhh! Heatwave-here-I-come! :angryfire


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## DefStatic (Feb 19, 2013)

Is this service still working? Looks like the site no longer carries this, so I am wondering if the service even still works.


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## Wasserpest (Jun 12, 2003)

Sorry, never saw your reply! Yes, still working well, measuring and recording. So far 1.3 Mio records, each with 3 samples (sensor, housing, humidity). 

They changed the download file so it contains only a month or so of data, which is great. Perhaps they took my advise.

Not sure if they stopped selling these. I won't be too upset if the whole thing stops working, I have gotten my value out of them, and now I rarely even look at the data. In Summer/Fall, when it gets hot here, it helps me look at trends and max temps in the tanks. In Winter, I can see when and how long it was freezing. Since I have now several years worth of data, I can go back and check fairly easily when the last freezing night was, what time of the year it is hottest, etc.


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