Your last generator Maintenance Run

[kevinwak]

If your power is out how does the wifi work to send a message?? Then there is this https://duckduckgo.com/l/?kh=-1&udd...ne.com/news/defcon-thermostat-control-hacked/

Not sure about the thermostat, but I do have a web based level transmitter in my fresh water cistern I can look at my water level on my phone and it sends me a text at my set order water point. The website that this is based on will also text alert if it loses connection with the transmitter. If power goes out my internet will be down. Then I will get the text from my cistern transmitter website notifying me of loss of connection/power out. I am very safe to assume that with the power out the furnace won’t run. Therefore the temp will be dropping and I should get some to go over and manually connect and start my gen. Luckily in my adult life we have only had 3 power outages greater than 20 minutes.

 

[ultrarunner]

I've been able to get hand me down UPS of medium size... 1400 and larger... they do need batteries which the 18 amp are not free...

One nice thing about copper phone wires is they almost always work... even in the middle of nowhere even for my friends 7 miles off grid in Santa Cruz Mountains... the rural phone act had the Phone Company run miles of underground cable to remote homes late 60's...

Kind of amazing living with camp stove and small propane and here the phone ring!

Limited for solar as the redwood canopy is so dense and now the area is declared watershed and most trees protected.

 

[3930dave]

Not sure about the thermostat, but I do have a web based level transmitter in my fresh water cistern I can look at my water level on my phone and it sends me a text at my set order water point. The website that this is based on will also text alert if it loses connection with the transmitter. If power goes out my internet will be down. Then I will get the text from my cistern transmitter website notifying me of loss of connection/power out. I am very safe to assume that with the power out the furnace won稚 run. Therefore the temp will be dropping and I should get some to go over and manually connect and start my gen. Luckily in my adult life we have only had 3 power outages greater than 20 minutes.

They may have that system locked down, but have you tried talking to those folks about adding a room temperature sensor ? That may be the easiest/fastest route, if available.

You had a non-power related furnace fault.... they do happen (piezo igniters fail, one example...), so being able to know temperature remotely is handy.

If you want to roll your own, try Pi. IIRC, Raspberry Pi boards (some?) already have an onboard Temp sensor.... not difficult to add remote ones.

Monitor your home temperature using your Raspberry Pi - PrivateEyePi Project

Another guy's approach....

How To Monitor Room Temperature with a Raspberry Pi - Raspberry Pi Blog

^ live picture of what that sensor looks like.

Rgds, D.

 

[3930dave]

I've been able to get hand me down UPS of medium size... 1400 and larger... they do need batteries which the 18 amp are not free...

One nice thing about copper phone wires is they almost always work... even in the middle of nowhere even for my friends 7 miles off grid in Santa Cruz Mountains... the rural phone act had the Phone Company run miles of underground cable to remote homes late 60's...

Kind of amazing living with camp stove and small propane and here the phone ring!

Limited for solar as the redwood canopy is so dense and now the area is declared watershed and most trees protected.

Often commercial/industrial upses get cycled out, for nothing more than needing a battery. On a smaller older one I picked up like that, I modded the wiring and run a much larger external battery instead..... not a fast recovery using the on-board OE charger, but gives me the longer run-time I was after.

I like selectively combining tech..... my deal is performance/reliability, not so much whether it's the same era of design/production. Copper still has it's place..... legacy Bell stuff was well designed, with big battery banks in the COs........ had internet (cable) down here last year, from nothing more than an extended power outage.... the cable junction boxes seem to only have battery for low hours, not days.....

Redwoods ! Heck of an anchor there.... get out the climbing gear and poke a small wind-genny up through the canopy !!!! Even the arboreal embracers should like that one !

Rgds, D.

 

[Fallon]

They may have that system locked down, but have you tried talking to those folks about adding a room temperature sensor ? That may be the easiest/fastest route, if available.

You had a non-power related furnace fault.... they do happen (piezo igniters fail, one example...), so being able to know temperature remotely is handy.

If you want to roll your own, try Pi. IIRC, Raspberry Pi boards (some?) already have an onboard Temp sensor.... not difficult to add remote ones.

Monitor your home temperature using your Raspberry Pi - PrivateEyePi Project

Another guy's approach....

How To Monitor Room Temperature with a Raspberry Pi - Raspberry Pi Blog

^ live picture of what that sensor looks like.

Rgds, D.

The HUGE problem with rolling your own is to be useful it needs to be connected to a network & it is almost guaranteed to be insecure. Unless you are extremely diligent about patching it & the apps you use are maintained well (updated regularly) you will have huge holes into your network to be exploited. Commercial devices may or may not be much better.

I'm an IT security engineer & know I cant maintain those type of systems well enough. I've got several Pi of various sorts for various projects. But none are Internet accessible. If they have Internet connectivity at all, its outbound only. Which would work for a freeze or flood alarm via Email or something, but not so much for tempature monitoring.

 

[ultrarunner]

Often commercial/industrial upses get cycled out, for nothing more than needing a battery. On a smaller older one I picked up like that, I modded the wiring and run a much larger external battery instead..... not a fast recovery using the on-board OE charger, but gives me the longer run-time I was after.

I like selectively combining tech..... my deal is performance/reliability, not so much whether it's the same era of design/production. Copper still has it's place..... legacy Bell stuff was well designed, with big battery banks in the COs........ had internet (cable) down here last year, from nothing more than an extended power outage.... the cable junction boxes seem to only have battery for low hours, not days.....

Redwoods ! Heck of an anchor there.... get out the climbing gear and poke a small wind-genny up through the canopy !!!! Even the arboreal embracers should like that one !

Rgds, D.

I was wondering if a UPS could charge a small automotive battery as this would greatly extend run time?

Most of the ones are in the 1400 or 1500 size and one I picked up is sinewave!!!

 

[aczlan]

I was wondering if a UPS could charge a small automotive battery as this would greatly extend run time?

Most of the ones are in the 1400 or 1500 size and one I picked up is sinewave!!!

It could, would be slow to charge though and unlike a sealed battery that they come with, it could offgas hydrogen.

Aaron Z

 

[ultrarunner]

It would make a good combination with back up power... both for surge protection and covering the lag time until Genset is up.

A few years back I came to work early on a Monday morning... the air was acidic and very irritating... a UPS went rouge and was a runaway... the battery had buckled and was too hot to even touch...

It was years out of warranty but I contacted the manufacturer and was given a free replacement and a call tag to send the runaway one back... the engineering team was very interested... only time in 30 years I have had one go bad like this.

 

[kevinwak]

The HUGE problem with rolling your own is to be useful it needs to be connected to a network & it is almost guaranteed to be insecure. Unless you are extremely diligent about patching it & the apps you use are maintained well (updated regularly) you will have huge holes into your network to be exploited. Commercial devices may or may not be much better.

I'm an IT security engineer & know I cant maintain those type of systems well enough. I've got several Pi of various sorts for various projects. But none are Internet accessible. If they have Internet connectivity at all, its outbound only. Which would work for a freeze or flood alarm via Email or something, but not so much for tempature monitoring.

This is now talking a language I don’t understand

 

[vvanders]

Yeah, Fallon is on the mark. Outbound stuff where you don't have to open ports to a reputable company is usually a decent bet. If you need to open up any ports and aren't running IDS, segmented VLANs/DMZ and being on top of security updates like a hawk you're asking to get added to a botnet.

Even with outbound only stuff it's all a matter of mitigation. You can still be compromised as may owners of cheap IP cameras and the like have found out. I dip in and out of the infosec space and it's all about defense in depth, principal of least privilege and minimizing the ability to pivot. Given enough resources and time anything can be exploited since the surface vectors these days are so large.

For what it's worth I've got 4 1U racked servers in my home office, IoT stuff on separate VLANs and I still won't open up anything. It's just way too much of a risk these days.