How to monitor a vacation home from 100 miles away
June 22, 2019 2:17 PM   Subscribe

We're buying a second home on Cape Cod (yay!). We live in Boston. We will rent it out a lot of the summer and hopefully for some of the fall. We'll spend our summer vacation there and weekends in the off-season. Trying to figure how to monitor from afar. I also have a question about a specififc quirk inside involving a weird bulkhead containing the water heater and other things.

For anything internet related, I'm thinking of getting 100mbps deal from Xfinity (it's my only choice), to start.

First, I'd love any advice from people who have a second home that they rent out on how they monitor things from afar or just overall make use of smart tech.

Here's the quirky part: the electrical panel, well pressure tank, and water heater are in what looks like a bulkhead BUT it doesn't go under the house. You lift up a piece of wood to reveal, a ladder and those things. Here is a photo of the inspector checking it out. He was concerned about things freezing (we would drain pipes when not there in the winter), but the sellers have lived there year round for 10 years with no trouble. They wonder if it's because they periodically used hot water thereby making the water heater fire up and warm up that space. We can insulate the wood that is the "door" to it, but could anyone recommend a remote temperature sensor I can use? Does anyone know how much I should worry about a water heater getting cold?
posted by jdl to Home & Garden (6 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
We have a freeze alarm on our extra place (several thousand miles away)- very old-school but it calls us from the landline when the power goes out or the temperature drops below the level we set. We like the older land-line tech because it will still work when the power goes out.
posted by charmedimsure at 3:23 PM on June 22, 2019


In New Zealand it's pretty common to ask visitors to clean up after themselves/bring their own linens/towels etc. But usually people who live out of town will also have a local who keeps an eye on the place, gives it a clean between tenants to check they haven't had a party and left a disaster zone. If you've got that sort of arrangement, then your cleaning person could also be your contact if your freeze alarm goes off.
posted by slightlybewildered at 5:18 PM on June 22, 2019 [4 favorites]


It looks like you could use slab insulation (sheet foams) to line the walls, roof (lid) and maybe the floor. If you connected a small heater that came on at a certain temperature, that would almost guarantee no freezing, at a cost in electricity. However, if the insulation is installed well and works properly the heater may not be required. People here sometimes put a light bulb in their pump enclosure for this purpose, but a LED or flouro probably wouldn't put out enough heat.

In the short term, a friendly neighbour could do a check/run the HWS when the temps dropped to dangerous levels, and you can check the weather forecasts/reports for the area. 100m/160kms is a nice country drive if the worst comes to the worst, not like it's thousands!
posted by GeeEmm at 5:51 PM on June 22, 2019


A friend of mine was building a wine cellar, and while talking to him I became aware of the truly mind-boggling number of products that will monitor and even manage climate control. Simply take a fast look at Amazon. Sorry, I don’t have any specific recommendations. But once you’ve got internet connectivity, you can set up almost anything.

If it were me, I’d put extra thought into Security (keep hackers out) and Redundancy (a secondary Internet connection? A backup power supply?). I’d imagine a house on Cape Cod is a fairly major investment that’s worth putting a little money into to keep it safe.
posted by doctor tough love at 1:09 AM on June 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Thanks everyone - I literally didn't even know about freeze alarms! Nor had I thought about connecting a small heater. Luckily the sellers have connected us with their electrician who set the house up to use a generator during storms, etc. Hadn't occurred to me to ask him about setting up a heater in there. And like you've all said, it's only an hour and a half-is drive... so not too bad if we ever need to head down there spur of the moment.
posted by jdl at 6:14 AM on June 23, 2019


There was just a segment on Ask This Old House about monitoring water systems. Video
posted by kathrynm at 8:07 AM on June 23, 2019


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