I’d like your recommendations for an off the shelf, pre-packaged (if poss), solution to monitor the temperature of my hot water tank via HA. I’d be happy for it to be IP or Zigbee based, mains or battery powered. But the key thing is that I’m after a finished product that doesn’t need me to buy bits and bobs from different sources and then solder them together and box them in some fancy 3D printed enclosure.
Ideally I want to have 3 sensors (top, middle and bottom of tank) so either 3 individual products (have to be cheap) or a simple plug and play way of attaching additional sensors.
Yes, I know I could go down the ESP32 + DS18B20, or even the Shelly 1PM + temp addon + DS18B20, routes but I’d rather not have to piece these together with any transformers/enclosure.
Not what you wanted to hear, but I just put together an ESP8266 solution with five DS18B20’s to monitor my boiler. No soldering, no 3D printing, no special transformer. I found a plastic project box about the right size on line. They’re pretty easy to make the appropriate holes in with a drill, or even an X-Acto knife.
The ESP device I used was the NodeMCU, which has a USB jack and WiFi on board. I bought an expansion board with screw terminals so I could connect the wires from the temperature sensors without soldering, and could change them later if needed. I had an old USB power supply wall plug kicking around, but those are cheap enough at just about any department store.
Putting it all together took under an hour. I know you didn’t want to go that route, but I wanted you to know it’s not as intimidating as it seems.
Thanks @CaptTom . I’ll have a long hard think and see if I take the leap.
If you could provide details of the expansion board that would be great. Also, if you followed guidance from a blog or web page that would be really helpful. Whenever, I take on a challenge like this I do like to stand on the shoulders of giants wherever possible.
LOL, my shoulders won’t get you very high. But there is a lot of good information right in this forum. This will be a very simple project, I promise!
First off, you asked about the expansion board for the NodeMCU ESP8266 board I’m using:
I’ve got nothing against soldering, but using something like this makes the whole project neater and easy to reconfigure if you find a better way to do things, or just want to try out different options. You should be able to find these on line at Ali Express or Amazon or wherever else you prefer.
The expansion boards fit right in, and the hard plastic isn’t so brittle that you can’t drill it or even carve out openings with an X-Acto knife.
I found tons of information about using the Dallas temperature probes. A few I made note of were:
and
As for practical issues, get the temperature sensors which are bedded in a stainless steel tube with a waterproof cable attached. I got my last batch from Amazon. The one thing you can’t do with these is put them inside a pressurized system like your water heater. You can buy industrial-grade sensors which come in a threaded nipple you can install into your plumbing, but I didn’t need to incur the expense or risk to get that level of accuracy. I put my sensors up against the metal of the boiler, and the “in” and “out” water pipes, with a bit of insulation over them so they read pretty close to the actual water temperature.
