I thought I’d write about the start of my home monitoring system. It has long been my thought that I should keep track of things like temperature, humidity, etc. within my home with a computer, as well as controlling the fans, heating, and cooling so that I can figure out a better way to optimize the system for more even and efficient climate control. Thermostats work, but they’re pretty limited — they are only one place in the house, which makes them rather unresponsive. If you have a house like mine, the dining room will be fine, the bedroom will be toasty, and the basement will be freezing. Surely there’s a way to balance that out without just turning up the temp.

Hence my start. I am using a system called the “1-wire” system created by Dallas Semiconductor which, despite it’s name, actually requires 2 wires. (It gets its name because only 1 wire is used for data transmission.) It consists of a converter that plugs into the back of a computer and a bunch of sensors — little chips — that you place around the house. You then run wires from the converter to those chips to hook it all together. These chips measure temperature, humidity, pressure — lots of things.

So far I only have one temperature-sensing chip, but I have some more on the way, and eventually will pick up humidity ones, etc. But I’ve managed to construct the software to run it and to collect useful data from it.

Behold my current temperature sensor graph:
Click Here to See It!

Go ahead, go gaze at it in wonder. The sensor is currently placed just outside the window of one of the basement windows, so I’m getting a reading of the temperature outside. Now, it’s not in the best place yet to measure outside temps — in the morning you’ll see a spike as the morning sun beats down on that side of the house, warming the black sensor way past what the temperature actually is. I need to move it to someplace permanent and more sensible for temperature measurement, but I’ll get there. Right now, I’m just happy to have it up and working and producing neat-looking graphs.

Ultimately, temperature sensors will be placed in all sorts of places — rooms, outside, inside appliances (monitoring the freezer temperature, furnace temp, fish and turtle tank temps, etc.) and probably eventually monitoring things like computer case temperatures, etc. All this will be incorporated into one or more graphs.

Then what? Well, there’s electronic ways to turn things on and off, so I plan on doing that next, specifically, turning the furnace fan and the heating/cooling on and off as needed. If I tell the system to hold the temperature at 72F, then it should be able to do so, whether that means heating, cooling, or otherwise.

The third stage of this is to more finely control where the heat and cooling goes by putting motors on the louvers of the different air runs in the house. By doing so, the system will be able to open and shut registers and regulate where air goes. This will be quite a ways off, however.

Yes, it’s very geeky, but what the hell. I’m having fun and hopefully I’ll save a few bucks in the long run by keeping closer track of what things are doing.