Can I get notifications of power outages by e-mail?

July 26, 2005 12:36 PM

Our dog stays at home while we're out working. She does fine and has people walking her on most days, but with the generally unreliable nature of electric power on hot Virginia days, I worry that the house may lose power and heat up to an uncomfortable temperature while my wife and I are at work. Does anyone have any experience with an inexpensive, easy-to-setup way for me to get an e-mail alert if the power goes out or the temperature gets to a certain point? This looks neat, but if the house loses power it won't do me much good.
posted by laze to Home & Garden (17 answers total)

Response by poster: Sorry, bum link. This one should work.
posted by laze at 12:37 PM on July 26, 2005

I would imagine that if you have a UPS set up for your computer it shouldn't be too much trouble.

http://www.aeceuro.co.uk/news/Miniguardreview.asp

according to this review the UPS will send you email alerts about power fluctuations. Of course you'd have to hook up whatever kind of modem you use to the UPS.
posted by jefeweiss at 12:48 PM on July 26, 2005

I assume you don't have a basement? What if you put a bunch of ice cubes in a separate water dish every morning before you leave for work?
posted by ZenMasterThis at 12:49 PM on July 26, 2005

This doesn't answer your question, sorry, but I just wanted to say that I don't think you should worry too much. You might come home to a hot dog, but as long as you leave plenty of water, she'll be fine.
posted by Specklet at 1:01 PM on July 26, 2005

Mod note: fixed bum link
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 1:07 PM on July 26, 2005

Best answer: if you can leave a computer on, you could set up a cron job to send you "pulse" emails every hour. if no email, call to check if the answering machine picks up the phone. Will only help with power outage detection ofcourse, but is trivial to set up.
posted by anonetal at 1:12 PM on July 26, 2005

Have you considered a call to your cell phone rather than an email?
posted by mischief at 1:14 PM on July 26, 2005

Alternately, your UPS can trigger an action on the part of your computer, as I think any modern UPS will do. Set up a macro (on Mac, you'd call it an Automator task) to be executed when power is lost (e-mailing you) and another to be executed when power returns (e-mailing you to tell you that).
posted by waldo at 1:31 PM on July 26, 2005

Response by poster: Hey, good thoughts. I think the "pulse e-mail" seems like the most low-budget way to go about it. While it doesn't cover the rare case of something happening to the AC while the power is still running, it does cover most cases where I'd be concerned about the heat.

mischief - I don't carry a cell phone on a regular basis (gasp!), but I am online most of the day.

specklet - you're probably right, but we just adopted her recently, so I'm still in the over-protective, mildly paranoid stage.
posted by laze at 1:47 PM on July 26, 2005

We have had several instances of the AC going out on hot days and have come home to a very warm house. It never has been as warm as the day was hot, unlike a car that my be several tens of degrees hotter than the outside air when parked in the sun.

Energy enters the car through its windows as short wavelength visible light, is absorbed by the interior surfaces, and then radiated back as infrared. The windows on your car are more opaque to infrared and so that heat is trapped in your car. Those shiny windshield shades work because they reflect the visible light rather than convert it to infrared and so some of it "bounces" back out the windshield.

The ratio of the car's internal volume to the area of glass it contains is probably one or more magnitudes higher than the same ratio in your house so your house heats up much more slowly than your car (it is insulated better as well.) Your house also has a lot more "heat sink" (cool mass) that absorbs heat for some time before it starts to re-radiate it. Your house would probably take a couple of days to reach ambient (out side) temperature.

Our dogs stay outside (it was over 100 degrees yesterday.) They have access to plenty of water. They don't like it but they are fine.
posted by leafwoman at 1:57 PM on July 26, 2005

The ratio is lower not higher.

Car windows approx. 25 sq ft, volume approx 100 cu ft. (4x4x5)

House windows approx. 400 sq ft (20 4x5 windows), volume approx 16000 cu ft
(2000 sq ft x 8)

Car ratio 4 to 1

House ratio 40 to 1

Sorry about that.
posted by leafwoman at 2:05 PM on July 26, 2005

Monitoring the computer heat level would give you a notification that should be relatively representative of your home heat. So if (in addition to the UPS recommendation earlier) you get an alert from your computer that it's overheating that may give a good indication that your air conditioning is on the blink.

Many motherboard manufacturers supply temperature monitoring software for Windows (ie. ASUSprobe). For Linux (what I know best) it would be a fairly simple matter to script a check on the internal thermometers, assuming you've got lmsensors (or whatever) set up properly.
posted by Kickstart70 at 2:14 PM on July 26, 2005

I setup a very rube-golderbergian method of monitoring the tempature in my new PC enclosure remotely, via a simple radioshack weather station and a webcam.

Right now it's offline, so the image is old (and from the end of the day when ambient lighting was low, so it's grainier than it was during the day when I most needed to see the temp), but the weather station shows the time as well as temp, so it's easy to notice if the webcam has stopped upoading new images....
posted by nomisxid at 2:26 PM on July 26, 2005

A few other people have mentioned it, but unless you're working really long hours (12+), your dog should be fine even if the power goes out. I live in VA, and I turn my A/C off during the day when I'm not home (becuase I'm cheap) and set it to about 72 at night. Anyway, my apartment only heats up to about 80-82 degrees while I'm at work. Just keep your blinds closed or at least partially closed, make sure she has plenty of water, and she'll be fine. I can understand your worrying though - it has been HOT this week :)
posted by geeky at 2:56 PM on July 26, 2005

Wouldn't it be easier if your home computer doesn't have UPS? Then you could just ping it once in a while. Or set up a web server on it if your firewall blocks icmp, and use one of the numberless Windows web server monitor programs.

(And yes of course the dog should be fine, if uncomfortable, unless your house is unusually oven-like. Some of us don't even have air conditioning.)
posted by sfenders at 8:02 PM on July 26, 2005

Did anyone else misread "hot Virginia"?
posted by lemonfridge at 2:46 AM on July 27, 2005

I would say rephrase the question to ask if the temperature rise over eight hours of power outage would be a concern. Unless you live in a glass mobile home, the answer is no (really even over multiple warm days). The air will be stuffy when you get home but should come no where near approaching the exterior temperature of the day.
posted by Dick Paris at 10:36 AM on July 27, 2005