I’ve been on the hunt for a cheap internet based deep freeze temperature sensor for some time. We have a chest freezer that stores a whole beef and more at a time, but isn’t opened or checked on daily, so it would be very expensive to have it go down unnoticed. In my research, I came across many expensive and custom industrial sensors with proprietary software, complex setup that required coding or even a separate gateway. It’s not that I couldn’t do any of that; I just thought it shouldn’t be rocket science to monitor a freezer. IoT should not be expensive or complicated.
Freezer and display shown
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At the same time I was looking for freezer monitor, I was also looking for a new cheap but accurate weather station. I came across AmbientWeather.com. They had the highest rated inexpensive, but accurate and full featured, weather station, the AmbientWeather WS-2902. If you’ve seen my tweets (@AaronBobeck), I’ve been very pleased with this weather station in comparison to a much more expensive Davis. Other than the WeatherUnderground website issues, it has been flawless (also reports to AW and WeatherCloud).
Since I was so happy with AW’s WS-2902 outdoor weather station, I took a look at their other products and found the sub $30 WS-0262A Wireless Internet Remote Monitoring Weather Station. This inexpensive little weather station is really designed to be a simple weather station that reports indoor and outdoor temperatures in a house or building.
WS-0262A listing on AmbientWeather.com
Since I already had WiFi internet access in the building where the chest freezer was located, I decided to give the sub $30 WS-0262A a try. Using their free Android App, I connected the display to WiFi and updated its firmware, along with setting up reporting to AmbientWeather.net. The display began reporting immediately, so I put the indoor temperature probe in the freezer and watched the temperature drop.
AmbientWeather.net also has alerts you can setup for conditions. I get a text message when the freezer gets above 20 degrees F
Everything was working perfectly and I was very happy with such an inexpensive device, but it would not drop below 14 degrees F. Turns out, the indoor sensor was only rated for +14 degrees F and the manual was wrong (thanks Ed in the AW Users Facebook group). This meant I had to switch to the outdoor sensor, which wasn’t a big deal, but does require lithium ion batteries since it’s wireless. The outdoor sensor has been 100% trouble free for 5 months now, and I actually caught a very old freezer starting to go bad. I started getting a text it was getting above 20 degrees when the weather warmed up this spring.
The old freezer would get above 20 degrees when the weather got warmer. Notice the new freezer was put into service end of April, cycles between 10 and -10 degrees F, other than when the lid is open.
Live view of freezer sensor below:
(AmbientWeather.net recently enabled free sharing of their weather stations reporting to their website)
powered by Ambient Weather
Display and indoor sensor
“Outdoor” sensor, which is inside the freezer
Make sure to check out the manual for the WS-0262A if you have questions.
This could be used for many different scenarios, freezer, refrigerator, etc.. It could also monitor the temperature inside your home bet setup to alert you the heat went out in the winter. There are no subscription fees for AmbientWeather.net or the device at writing of this post