I send my wife down. If she comes back up cold and damp, I know everything’s OK.
Very low tech; La Crosse Technology WT-137U Digital Thermometer/Hygrometer with Comfort Meter, $14.95 at Amazon. It is not remote but works just fine for our 2600 btl passive cellar.
Has anybody used the Moniteur du Vin by Guardian?
Good topic…I have an LLBean weather machine.
Lacrosse Alerts Temp/Humidity Sensor
Allows constant remote monitoring using your smart phone or tablet. If you subscribe to the service, you get texts/e-mail alerting you if the monitor senses temps outside of a range that you set.
So here’s an interesting story. I use this and it came with some amount (year?) of the alerts included. When it came time to re-up, I declined as I didn’t want to spend the money. I figured since I’m around the cellar daily, if it malfunctioned I’d hear it running continuously and I’d know something was up. That and I open the app and check every couple of days anyways if I haven’t been in the cellar.
So last week I was at work in the morning and I happened to check the app. It showed the temp was up to 78 in the cellar and rising over the past day and a half. It also showed the humidity had risen abnormally high. I also have a remote probe plugged into it that is outside the cellar to show me the outside room temp. It was showing the temp that the room should have been so it appeared to be operating normally.
If I had the alerts still active I would have gotten an e-mail/text at least a day ago when the temp first started going up and out of the range I had set. So I could have checked on what was going on when I was home. But now I’m at work and a 25 mile drive to get home to check on this… or wait 8 hours until I normally get home. I decided I better leave work right then since the indicated temp was still rising.
So I get home and find that the temp in the cellar was fine. Rock solid at 58 where I have cooling unit set. I look at the sensor and the LCD display was dim. Obvious sign of low battery. I pulled the batteries and put in new ones and now it’s reading 58 and the humidity is a believable %, so that confirms it was just the circuit in the sensor malfunctioning due to the low battery. Both AA batterys tested at 1.1 V. Again, low. The external probe, that had not been malfunctioning, is probably on a different circuit and not yet affected by the low battery level.
Moral of the story? I probably should not have let the alerts subscription lapse. It cost me 1 hour of my time and 50 miles of driving, which with the gas mileage my vehicle gets (not good), ended up costing me a fair amount of $$.
Also, if anyone else has this Lacrosse sensor, that’s how the sensor will malfunction when the batteries get low.
I am not at much risk as I live in a mild climate and have a basement cellar. I don’t have remote monitoring at all, just a cheap standalone from Amazon. But I am a techie and am working in IoT currently. This thread has inspired me to build a cheap DIY device for the community which would have much lower ongoing costs using public cloud services for notifications. I will check back soon, stay tuned!
Eric, I’ll be curious to see what you come up with. I have one I built on top of a Particle Photon and AWS (not using their new IoT service; just API Gateway+Lambda to provide the device API), but I haven’t gotten around to cleaning it up enough to make it worthy of providing to others.
Did you check out this project Sean? I’ve been thinking about “rolling my own” solution for some time to do this given the low costs and the emerging ubiquity of IoT cloud services. From what I can tell hardware costs would be sub $30USD and Blynk cloud integration is free. I could be wrong though, I’ve not really devoted any real time to it. Those Particle Photon boards look really impressive for the cost.
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Awesome to hear your solution Sean! I see your posts on the particle community boards with Lambda code.
I was trying not to pimp my employer too much but I am a Solution Architect with the company you mentioned, with subject matter expertise in our IoT platform. I think with a very basic setup you could connect to household WiFi, use the services to store historical data (good for insurance purposes), as well as provide real time notification when preset temp and humidity thresholds are breached. Since I get bonus points for creating demos (and I happen to know some of my coworkers are wine geeks) this is a no-brainer. FWIW, I have many coworkers who are interested in these low power devices and it is feasible to create one that works on battery power. I will attempt to consider that as a design parameter.
Best part is we can open source the code on github and make it really easy for the community to get started. The hardware can likely be acquired for under $50 and not including the free tier services would not likely exceed pennies per month. I am actually sitting in my hotel room at a company conference planning the config, when I should be at a party with free drinks. Since it is Vegas, I did BYO anyway and I am drinking 2012 Maison Bleue Bourgeois Grenache as we speak.
For the non-geeks: Using cheap hardware and ‘the cloud’ we can implement long term temperature and humidity monitoring with email or even SMS notification for not so much $$$.
What did you think of the grenache? I’m proudly holding all six bottles I received last year. Actually, last time I checked there were still some for sale on the MB website. I really hope you can pull this off Eric.
I can understand the DIY philosophy - that’s me with home improvement stuff. However, given the effort, I’m really not sure how much can be saved versus a Netatmo set-up. One-time cost of $150, and that’s it. The platform is maintained by someone else, and the only extra effort or ‘cost’ is occasionally updating the app on your phone. And for me, the historical graphing features that are a part of the Netatmo app are a huge value add - which I assume would not be a part of a DIY set-up.
FWIW, I do have graphing on my DIY setup, but I did it more as a fun project than for cost savings. I think that if there’s a $150 device that does a good job, people should use that.
Resurrection!
Hey folks. Miss the boards and maybe just maybe life’s little jabs will give me a break and I can get back to surfing the board more often.
Lacrosse has moved to a new model. I no longer get text alerts and the process to the new system has left my Gateway no longer working. Their support model is horrid.
Anyone have any other suggestions for remote Cellar monitoring? I might pull the trigger on a Netatmo
Agree Lacrosse support is horrid.
But has the hardware changed or just the back end? They started migrating people to the new online portal - follow the instructions on the website and it should work.
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Any thoughts or experience with Lascar temp/humidity data loggers?
A more robust solution with free cloud storage, remote access and alerting/alarming:
No, but that only logs and you have to download the data to a computer occasionally. No real-time monitoring.
I set up a NetAtmo and am very happy with it. Couldn’t have been easier.
I happen to have a La Crosse indoor/outdoor clock/weather station in my office, and I’m not a fan. They’re not terribly accurate (the unit doesn’t agree with itself if you put the outdoor sensor in the same room as the indoor sensor), it eats batteries, and I just had my second remote sensor failure. I’m just going to junk it. I don’t think it’s the same unit others were using, but it doesn’t inspire confidence.
There’s a DIY app for Raspberry Pi called Cellar Warden.
A topic was started by the creator on the Cellartracker Forums earlier this year.
I’m still in the assembly phase.
I just gave up on my La Crosse system and bought Netatmo. Wish me luck.