I picked up a couple of these and when you have wifi they can be set up to send you notifications. You connect to them via Bluetooth to set them up or if wifi is down. I like how they monitor my freezers and fridge. This way I can know when I need to fire up the generator to cool stuff down.
I in no way am affiliated with this company or seller, just wanted to share the usefulness of the product.
That’s pretty cool…I’m gonna have to get one of those.
Don’t really care about the food all that much, honestly, but we have probably $20k worth of temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals in the fridge right now that I’m very concerned about…
Yep, I hear you on that one. That was the main reason for me as well.
I did catch a stuck defrost cycle that drove the temp up to 71deg. Made me diversify my pharmaceuticals to other fridges. I wanted to open up some space in the main fridge and got a mini for the office. I am on my second mini and would not have caught the first one going out before it was too late had I not got a Govee for it.
Interesting, so even with the power out if you put this inside your freezer you can Bluetooth connect and monitor the interior temperature?
You can Bluetooth and monitor, I don’t know if you will get alerts though. I will kill my wifi tomorrow, make sure I am connected Bluetooth and see what it does and report back. When on wifi you can select how often you want it to check in. 10min/30min/60min. More often you have it report, the more battery you use. I have mine set for 30min and have data from august 2022 and 3 of 4 bars left on the battery. When it checks in, you get the data for the whole timeframe, not just that point in time. The app does have to run in the background to get the high/low or high/low humidity alerts. Now the deep freeze does drop lower than the minimum setting, so unless you bias the temp some in the app, you will get alarms every time your deep freeze cycles and drops low.
We just had a garage fridge die, went from fine to not fine before we even noticed. This is my use case for buying one. If the power goes out we’ll know, either being home or neighbors flooding social media.
Let me know how it works out- I am interested in this as I have 2 freezers full of meat and a fridge with medicine that needs monitored. I don’t have WIFI (too far out in the sticks) so it would have to be Bluetooth only.
If you want to know if the power is out while away from home check if your power company provides outage alerts via text message.
So it appears you can monitor the temps/humidity while on bluetooth, but did not alarm for me when I took the Govee out of the fridge with my WIFI off. I then turned my wifi on, but left the modem unplugged so I did not have internet access but still had wifi. Same results, I saw the device go above preset temp, but did not get an alarm.
I will need to do more testing to see if it failed to alarm simply because I had the app actively open when the temp went up, or if I need to wait for it to “check in” and then give me the alarm. Too many folks needing internet at the moment to test more robustly, but I will.
FYI, Bluetooth seems to drop once I get about 35-40’ from my freezer.
If you want just a bluetooth device to sync with your smartphone to give you inside fridge temp alerts while at home, then choose a bluetooth unit similar to the one linked below. Understand that bluetooth has limited range so if you’re next door or out and about on your property you’ll be out of range.
Read reviews using it for just that purpose.
We bit the bullet in February and had a Generac 24kw whole house backup generator installed. It runs off propane from our tank for furnace and water heater. What a great investment it was. Never looked back.
If you don’t mind me asking, what they hit you for? I would need to get a Lp tank because the NG line stops 800’ from my house and they want $10 per foot to run it to me.
You are going to be stunned at what large LP tanks cost. They are in short supply and extremely expensive.
A new thousand gallon tank could be almost as much as what they want to charge you to extend natural gas.
Hopefully that will come down.
In our area you can dig the ditch and run the pipe yourself and they will connect to it. But we also have multiple natural gas providers competing.
My local company has rentals which aren’t very high as long as you use X amount of gas. They are then responsible for the tank. Only downside is they are the only ones that can fill it.
Issue digging the line is there are other utilities in the servitude and 3 driveways to get under.