New construction, electrical rough-in phase. My refrigerator and freezer (two separate appliances) will each be on their own circuits, and there's nothing else on those circuits. However, I had the electrician "extend" each circuit into the attic for an outlet on each circuit. My original plan was to have each of the attic outlets power a relay (e.g., Functional Devices Relay-in-a-box). The relays' dry contacts would be wired to zones on the security panel (Elk M1 Gold), so the panel could notify me (voice announcement, email, SMS text, etc.) if either the refrigerator circuit or freezer circuit lost power.
Now that I'm becoming more familiar with HE and z-wave devices, I'm wondering if there is a better/easier solution using the two outlets. I'm okay with trusting HE, et al, to notify me (i.e., not going thru the Elk panel). Or maybe even letting HE notify the Elk panel (if possible). Is there a plug-in device (z-wave preferably) that I can use to easily detect a circuit power outage with HE?
I'm guessing that since a mains device can't communicate if it loses power, it will have to be a device that can be polled. If it doesn't reply, the assumption is that the circuit lost power. I don't need to know immediately, so the polling frequency can be minutes instead of seconds. The benefit to this over a mechanical relay for me is that it would eliminate the wiring between the relay and the panel (about 50' each), and I won't be tying up a couple of zones.
My backup plan to go with whatever I use for the primary method will be battery powered wifi "Temp Sticks" in each appliance that will notify me if the temperature is out of the acceptable range.
Is this a bad idea? If not, what device should I use?
Thanks, Ira
