I have a decorative pond in my backyard and it requires a floating deicer to prevent freezing over.
Well over the past several days we had sub zero weather and the outlet lost power and the pond froze over.
We were able to cut a hole in the ice with a chain saw but this could have been prevented with a notification of power lost.
What can I do to monitor this in the future, would some type of power meter wrapped over the heaters power cord work with some type of smartapp?
I dont need to know the whole house power is out since we have a standby generator, I just want to know if that circuit or more importantly the stupid GFCI pops.
Do you have a smart plug on it already or you putting one on I can’t tell?
WebCore has the ability to set up a notification when the power drops when using the official SmartThings power outlet.
Hmmm. Let’s start with the basics:
A) if the outdoor temp is above freezing, you have no need to know anything
B) if the outdoor temp is anticipated to go below freezing, you need to know if the circuit is active
C) if the temp is already below freezing, the circuit must be active - if it’s not, you have a frozen pond.
Does the device have its own temp sensors, and automatically kick in below a certain temperature?
As for (B)?? GFCI outlets have transformers to operate themselves, or had back in the day (doubt that has changed) so they are always drawing a tiny bit of juice. Might be too small for the clamp-on monitor to measure… but this can possibly be mitigated by winding the electric line around the clamp a few times. If the GFCI breaks the circuit, there will no longer be any current on the meter.
OR instead of winding, check first whether in normal GFCI operation (with no devices active on the line) the meter sees any current over a certain span of time. So the meter might mostly not see anything, but occasionally see tiny spikes. Then make your piston condition say “if no current seen over X timespan, send an alert to check the pond GFCI”.
I use one of these to monitor my sump pump… Same basic concept as what you’re doing.
Since you’re going into a GFI (like I am with the sump pump) you don’t want to change the plug itself. I am monitoring it using a webCoRE piston that I wrote. But I imagine you could do something similar with any SmartApp.
You don’t need to go that deep with it. If you go with the device I have you just monitor the $status. If that changes to “OFFLINE” then you know that the device no longer has any power going to it. As in my case, the GFCI popped over the summer before I had this installed and I didn’t know about it for days. Now I have it check for me every few hours. I even have it send me an email each night to tell me how many times it ran…
I like your idea Mike1616, I cant really tell, is that outdoor rated. Right now I have 2 10.4 amp heaters plugged into an outlet and two other heaters plugged into two separate outlets on different circuits.
I think once things calm down, and the ice finally melts away I am going to try your idea.
I have an old Aeon plug with energy meter, but didnt want to overload it, the cold must of got to me because I could have just plugged one heater into the adapter instead of what I was thinking I was going to have todo. (I was going to plug all the heaters into the one module rated for 15 amps and I thought that might be a bad idea for some reason.)
Mine are all insides, but they seem heavy duty. However, you can email the folks at the Smartest House and they should be able to tell you…or there is a separate thread here for the DTH for that plug where people have posted comments and asked questions. If I find it again I’ll post the link.
The Power Switch isn’t rated for outdoors but because it’s so well built, you can use it outside within its temperature rating (14° - 104°F) and covered from rain and snow.
