Smart thermometer for a fridge recommendations?

MPenten · December 3, 2019

Hello,

first of all, I'm not sure if this is the correct subforum.

Well, to the issue. I am looking for a smart thermometer that would work in a fridge. In said fridge there are medical vaccines and other medical material that needs to be kept at a certain temperature, GP's office, so not a huge amount, like, 10? 20?, you know. Should the temperature change for various reasons for T amount of time (malfunction of the fridge, power outage), the very expensive material could be compromised/ruined.

Right now the temperature is measured by a simple (dumb) "radio wireless" thermometer (or a wired one, doesn't really matter) sitting on top of the fridge.

Today we received an offer for a smart thermometer that will log the temperature (online, as you need to log the temperature every x hours) and notify us should there be a problem - via an sms, even during power outage. The problem is they want 300 dollars (in conversion) and a hefty subscription fee. They claim it to be medical grade, however it's not and they don't provide any warranty anyway.

Now, I'm looking for an alternative. I know there must be some sort of a "smart" fridge thermometer with logs and wifi and notifications and "normal" subscription or even none at all. However so far I've only found 1 thermometer from La Crosse. None other.

Would anyone have any recommendations?

Wired temp probe is an options, it should survive longer than something placed directly into a fridge.

Hackentosher · December 3, 2019

You could build one with an esp32 and a temperature sensor. I bet you could even find a project documenting how to do it on instructables or GitHub.

WereCatf · December 3, 2019

11 hours ago, Hackentosher said:

You could build one with an esp32 and a temperature sensor. I bet you could even find a project documenting how to do it on instructables or GitHub.

Indeed. A waterproof DS18B20, like e.g. on eBay combined with an ESP32 or ESP8266 would do the job perfectly well and could be powered with a bog-standard phone-charger. Just gotta log the sensor-data somewhere, but there are several such services out there, like e.g. Thingspeak. Or one could just roll their own, custom solution, like e.g. I use MQTT to send sensor-data to my OpenHAB-box for easy viewing. The OpenHAB-box also stores the data into a MySQL-database, so I can look back at old events.