I've been looking over some previous threads relating to how best to monitor a garage refrigerator. In that thread folks voiced their desire to be warned to both of incomplete closure of the door(s) as well as a drop in temperature that would be a sign of refrigerator failure of some sort.
The most logical way to deal with this would be by placing a temperature sensor in the refrigerator and/or freezer. However, as extreme cold is a batteries Achilles' heel, it seems a sensor would require constant and frequent battery changes while a contact sensor will not alert to a compressor failure.
I'd really like to have our garage refrigerator monitored. Is there a consensus on how best to handle this?
I have a Contact Sensor which will read Temp. I have this contact sensor in my Freezer in the Garage. I have a Notification setup if Temp is >= xx, send me a notification.
Some folks have mentioned a temperature sensor with a remote probe, similar in concept to the Everspring water sensors that have a probe on the end of a wire. I don't recall the brand . . . will try searching.
Qubino was the one I recall being mentioned. No personal experience . . .
They have a dry contact relay model that can be run off 24-30 VDC and will use their remote temperature probe. The dry contact could be used to trigger a local audible alarm while the Z-Wave signalling could alert you via Hubitat if remotely located.
Amazon sells the CentraLite 3323-C (perhaps a newer model). There are at least a couple of reviews stating that it works very well within a freezer. 18 month battery life would be great!
I noticed while poking around at TheSmartestHouse.com that the Fibaro water sensors also have a temperature sensor and these have terminals to wire them to an external 12 volt power supply.
$60 for the Z-Wave Plus model.
$30 Z-Wave - not-plus (also supports the external 12 volt power supply).
IRIS V1 contact sensors inside of two deep freezers here. Batteries read (23%) low but last for a year or more. Rock solid both out in a detached garage.
As mentioned, there's a seller on ebay that does lots of 10 on the motion sensors that has the door sensors without magnets or batteries cheap. That said, I bought 10 motion sensors listed as no batteries and they all had relatively fresh batteries and the pull tabs still in them,
Stick a small rare earth magnet on the side and they'll report closed.
Maybe try with a Sonoff TH16 (or TH10) with an external sensor. The sensor is a DS18B20
I think somebody here developped a tasmota firwmare or a more customized firmware for Hubitat.
I have the sensors but didn't try the firmware update so far. I need external sensors for various projects but had no time for them.
Both the magnet and the sensor need to be inside the refrigerator/freezer. Are these not secured using something like 3M double sided foam tape? I would have thought that there would have been a fairly good chance that the 'sticky' would have degraded with time due to temperatures (primarily the freezer). You haven't experienced this?
