Automating a Meat Curing Chamber

I’ve looked around a little to see if anyone else has done something like this, in the way I’m thinking. I’m thinking about making a meat curing chamber with an old min fridge. The idea is that it needs to be warmer than a fridge usually would be (50-70 degrees) and much more humid than the average room in my home (~50%) as well as having a little airflow.

I’ve got a couple of WiFi double smart plugs coming, which seems perfect for the job - one side of the outlet for the fridge and another for a small humidifier that I’d put into the fridge. I could monitor is all using a Wireless Sensor tag - I’m familiar with them, since I’m using one in my son’s room. A little drilling and add a small fan inside the fridge to keep air circulating and I think I’ve got what I’m looking for.

I think I could do this all with IFTTT, but I’m curious if anyone has a SmartApp that could handle this all in one place. Specifically, I’m looking for monitor humidity and turn on humidifier when RH% gets too low, and monitor temperature and turn on when it gets too high. IFTTT has the functionality, but it’d be nice to have it organized better if for no reason other than the ability to quickly turn the thing off when I’m not curing meat, which is often. Anybody know of anything that can handle that?

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I think most people would use webcore for this:

@jgirvine has a cheese cave set up that sounds like it might be somewhat similar to what you are attempting, and might have some more comments:

Brewing control?

A cheese cave… :nose:

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I did see the cheese cave, which looks pretty awesome BTW. But it looks like she’s just using it for monitoring, not control. I’m hoping to do it all. I’ve got to admit, I haven’t dipped my toes into Webcore yet. I do see a lot of posts saying that it’s not all that hard, but I was hoping there was something already built.

Edit: I did that thing men do, where they make bad assumptions about gender. Edited for correctness.

Tag-erino. This post is very relevant to my interests.

WebCoRE will certainly be the easiest part of this project. I desperately want to do the same thing, but am struggling with not only finding something to serve as the chamber at a reasonable cost (I’m thinking a used beverage display fridge would be ideal), but even harder…a place to put it in my home.

I happen to have an old mini fridge gathering dust in my garage, so the idea just clicked with me yesterday.

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