Anyone found a good sensor for monitoring if the stovetop was left on? Have a gas cooktop. Want an app that show status at a minimum. Better to have and left on for x time. Don’t need shut off.
Gas or electric? If it’s electric you might be able to use this switch, depending on how many volts & watts your oven requires.
Gas cooktop. There is a small red light when it’s on.
Hmmm…
There is a Z-Wave gas valve (pretty expensive, I think), which can turn the gas on or off … Handy for preventing an explosion or to shut off the stove that you’ve left on. I wonder, though doubt, if this valve can measure flow; if so, you could use it for the stove instead of whole house.
More generally, though, it would be good to come up with a way of monitoring non-connected appliances. Some solutions could be sophisticated (my dumb
Samsung fridge, for example, has a JTAG diagnostics port inside the embedded computer panel in the back…).
But, more simply, if there is an on
LED indicator, a light detector gadget might be possible; but how to make this practical? I can picture prototyping an Arduino with an octopus of light sensor wires. A more sophisticated solution would be a streaming camera that you run some pattern recognition to determine if light (specific pixels in the picture) are a certain color…?
I’m not sure if quirky spotter’s light sensor would help on this. You might want to try this
If it’s GE appliance, you may have half of the technical work done for you.
https://firstbuild.com/greenbean/
You may need to get a raspberry Pi and build your own device type for this.
Would love that video pattern identification off the LED since short term I’m thinking about focusing one of those new wireless Netgear cameras on it.
Good idea. I heard those quirky spotters were flaky though? Also from cnet they are not really real time… “can’t check the status of the Spotter’s sensors in real time. Quirky has added in a status indicator for each sensor, but it only tells you what the Spotter sensed the last time it communicated with the app. You can’t pull to refresh, or force the indicator to re-check. You’re forced to wait until it updates on its own, and in my tests, this was often quite a long time. I found myself fully aware of what the temperature was fifteen minutes before, but unable to see what it was at that moment.”
Copyninja - you are amazing! How do you keep up with all of these options! Can you find me a little translucent cover that I can put over the red led that senses light or power and can then transmit wirelessly to my network. Basically a spark.io device withlught sensor?
There are many sophisticated ways of doing this… I like “gadgets” but in this case I just put a SmartThings MultiSensor right above the cook top (under the microwave in my case - maybe on your hood if that is what you have) I use it for 2 purposes… 1) it turns on my kitchen fans when it gets too warm And also as an alarm for when the stove gets left on… Have it combined with a motion sensor in the kitchen and that way when there is no motion and the kitchen is over 82° and it is under 82° in the house (per other temp sensors) I get a push and a text to check the stove…
Not too “cool” but very functional… And also more reliable then a “visual” system…
But what if the gas is on with no flame? Temperature won’t get hot … but house will explode.
Great idea and even better - possible now. It will be interesting to see what the temp is with just one of the burners on. Thanks for the suggestion. Really appreciate you gave a solution that I can implement now.
In response to the possibility that the stove is on but the flame out - my stove has an automatic ignition that clicks all burners until they light. Since someone turned it on they would hear this. I suppose they could turn the stove on, forget about it and then the flame go out but I’ve never seen that happen. End of the day, just about every time we leave the house “someone” asks did you check the stove? Did we leave it on? This would at least give me an answer. Perfect? I think it solves the problem and is a lot better than what I have now - worry about it till get home
I don’t know if you solved this, but what about wiring an open/close sensor to that light on the stove. You could make a custom device type to change the state names.
Inspiration: Made a Water Leak Sensor
I also have a gas cooking range that I would like to monitor. The range needs to be plugged in to operate the control panel display, igniters and the relay that opens the main valve that supplies gas. If I shut off power to the gas range, it turns the gas supply off and shuts down as a safety feature. I won’t be able to tell if the range was left on or not, but I could remotely kill power to the gas range, in turn turning off any burners that were left on by accident. I don’t have this setup yet, but hoping this works.
@cooperglee I just had to turn around and drive 10 miles back to the house because my wife couldn’t remember if she left the stove on. I just bought the ST temp/humidity sensor and I just want to have it send me a notification if the temperature is up to a certain range and nobody is home. I have two questions:
-what smartapps are available for that? It seems you found one (but I don’t need to turn off /on anything).
-Did the app you use allow you to combine motion and heat sensing?
Thanks for any pointers here. I’m a bit new (new hub2.0 also) so am a little unfamiliar.
There are many different ways to do this, but As long as you are either arming the smart home monitor or setting a mode to away, you can use smart home monitor, and that will probably do the simplest. Just create a custom alert based on temperature on a particular sensor.
- Open the smart things mobile app to the dashboard. Tap On the “smart home monitor.”
This will open the smart home monitor status screen.
Two) click on the 3 vertical dots in the top right and choose Configure to create a new notification.
Three) choose custom
- now you can choose to trigger off of “temperature,” then choose the sensor and the other parameters.
- define the kind of notifications you want to receive, and when you want to receive them. You can use the “more options” to restrict them by mode so you only get it when you are away.
- give it a custom name, and save it.
Just remember that these notifications will only occur when you have “armed” smart home monitor. That sounded OK for your use case, but just in case you want to do it some other way, you can look at the apps in the marketplace and choose one of the notification ones there.
That’s exactly what I was looking for, thanks! AWesome I’m going to try this. FYI: between the time that I posted and now, I also found some smartapp code that does something similar and created a smartapp. However, I’m having some funny triggering happening - it seems to keep triggering the “sendNotifLo” temp scenario(?!). I’m wondering if you or anyone would have any ideas why that would be happening? Here is a code snippet:
def eTemperatureHandler(evt){
if (evt.doubleValue >= maxTemp){
if(freq) {
schedule(“0 0/$freq * * * ?”, sendNotifHi)
}
else{
sendNotifHi()
}
}
if(evt.doubleValue <= minTemp){
if(freq) {
schedule(“0 0/$freq * * * ?”, sendNotifLo)
}
else{
sendNotifLo()
}
}
}
@JDRoberts, thanks again for that. I went ahead and setup that monitor. I also was going to set one for the garage, but I have a question. It asks to monitor the sensor opening (garage up), then for “how long” (I guess that means how many minutes it’s open?), but then it asks “how frequently” - now does that mean how many times does it check it? That doesn’t really make sense to me as you’d want it to notify you if the garage is open while I’m away regardless of the interval, right?
recommendations here?
Thanks again!
@tslagle13 can you answer this one? I haven’t seen any details on the parameter settings in the smart home monitor.
@JDRoberts, now that I’ve set a smart home monitor, how the heck do I edit it? When I repeat the process it doesn’t show me the current monitors!? There’s probably a simple answer but I can’t find it.
Yes, I just tried it again and it doesn’t look like it’s saving… OH, now I’ve got it. You have to keep hitting “Done” about 10 more times. Sheesh… Sorry.
Mine lets me edit.
One) open smartthings mobile app to the dashboard
two) click on the smart home monitoring which will open its main page
Three) clicked on The three vertical dots in the upper right and choose the configure option.
Four) select the category for the alert you want to edit, probably custom
Five) this should show the list of your existing alerts . Tap on any one to edit it. Keep tapping done/next in the upper right of each screen until you’re completely finished.