Uh oh ….. That green line looks bad 😥

That’s one of the images created by my Raspberry Pi powered DHW temperature sensor in a house we have 107 miles away, and a drop of 50c within 10 mins showed that something was quite wrong …. Especially as we had left the house 24hrs earlier!

A drop in the air temp in that room suggested that the heat source (heat leaking from the megaflo) had been removed, so maybe there was a leak 😯

Luckily a friend was still in the village and he popped up and discovered a blown push fit connection on the hot water supply to the sink in the garage. Luckily this is the lowest room in the house by about 18″ and the water was flowing out under the garage door.

Scary to think that if I had’t put some system monitoring in, this could have gone unnoticed for weeks and been pretty costly in terms of water usage if nothing else! Geek-power 😆

Welcome to the wonderful world of SCADA, well DA, go on add some control as well, proper geek territory.

Welcome to the wonderful world of SCADA

Just had to google that!

I do have ‘some’ control – the house is 100% electric for water/air heating and there’s another Pi monitoring the air temp and controlling the heaters via wireless energenie sockets. I can set the target temperature and switch the system on/off remotely by logging in via ssh.

There’s also a proportional controller that diverts excess PV generation to the immersion – hence the monitoring so I can see how much hot water we’ve got.

This sounds great. Is this a sort of low tech version of a nest? Links? I’ve fancied trying something like this with a pi

now build a robotic plumber to have on standby in a cupboard 😀

What you need is an electronic stopcock to switch the water off from 100 miles away 😉

now build a robotic plumber to have on standby in a cupboard

double 😀

This sounds great. Is this a sort of low tech version of a nest? Links? I’ve fancied trying something like this with a pi

It’s pretty easy. Get the Energenie Pi-Mote and a couple of wireless sockets and off you go. Code is simple and works well – I can give you the code if you want.

I’m going to add some more code to email me if the water temp drops below 13c so I can react quicker. Obviously switching the water off when we left would have helped!

now build a robotic plumber to have on standby in a cupboard

Luckily it’s plastic pushfit pipework in the garage and easy to get to so a nice little job for me.

Remote management via SCADA etc – awesome fun from my security viewpoint ! Last week we got into an environmental control system – flashing lights from 800miles away, turning things on and off (all with the onsite team disbelieving and keeping an eye on us not killing it). Done pipelines, rigs, hydro, leccy dist, smartmeters , overhead gantrys etc. But v useful, did a great drone pilot for HVDC instepction, all remote controlled.

I know push fit is very popular and plumbers love it but it leaves me feeling uneasy. Local plumbing merchant says he hardly sells any solder fittings these days. I automatically try to minimise it at home. Use it all the time at work but at least it’s fairly accessible.

ironically the only pipe failures (2) in my house were soldered joints the previous owner (who was a plumber FFS) did …….

all the push fits poly pipe i have renewed the ground floor under floor pipes with have been rock solid.

The [black] push fit in this house is pretty old… about 15 years at least and doesn’t look that much like the speedfit stuff of today – I suspect things have moved on since it was fitted.
I’m fairly glad the rest of the house is in copper though.

I do worry about the internet of things given how insecure the rest of the world’s internet infrastructure is.

I can see Energy companies having black ops teams logging into people’s raspberry Pi’s and Nests and upping the thermostat setting a degree or two to increase their revenues…

I’d certainly wonder what’s been added to the firmware of Tado/Nest type devices – I can’t believe they’re ‘that’ secure. And I bet there’s a fair few Pi’s around still using the default account details.

Sounds a nice set up at a reasonable price sharkbait.