Heated worries? Be alerted about temperature and humidity

I hate to sound like a fanboy, but I would buy this if there were a linux version. Anthony, most internet servers run some version of *nix, if you can get a version that works on those, you can make some sysadmin’s job a bit easier (though only a bit, as they’re very likely to have a windows box lying around they could use for the purpose).
All my home services run on linux boxes, and my laptop is dual boot. :/ Perhaps I’m not your target customer.
Also, your last link in this post is broken.
REPLY:Fixed, WordPress editing bug. It will run under WINE in Linux. – Anthony

The link doesn’t work.
REPLY: WordPress bug…refresh and try again – A

From my ventilation course in mining engineering, we learned that relative humidity above 70% caused things to mildew and rust, while below 30% the cilli of the lungs couldn’t function properly, causing (especially older) people to struggle with colds, the flu, and pneumonia. This looks like a great tool to keep relative humidity in the proper range.

Does the driver and software work in Windows x64?
REPLY: Nothing much that has to talk to hardware works under Windows x64, this included. We gave up trying. The software works, but won’t talk to the hardware. The idea is to run this on a Win based x32 workstation monitoring the room- Anthony

Anthony,
Thanks for the quick reply.
If you are advertising this device for “Server and equipment rooms,” you are going to have to make it work with Windows Server x64 systems (2003/2003 R2/2008/2008 R2). Who uses Windows Server x86 systems in a modern server room anyway?
FD
REPLY: We don’t really expect people would use it on a production server, as you really don’t want anything running on those that will possibly take CPU cycles and resources away from the primary mission of a server. I have two kinds of people interested; those who think they should think they should run secondary apps on a mission critical server, and those who think that idea is nuts.
We figure this would run on a workstation. That’s how we do it. Besides, I don’t want the responsibility of having to ensure that it will work unfettered with some server app competing for resources. I just don’t think a server is the place to run things like this. Most server rooms have one or more workstations used for monitoring the network situation.
We do have self contained TCP/IP systems that will work with any box, any OS, you can run your own query system or use the windows software on any workstation anywhere. More expensive though see http://www.tempelert.com and the network multichannel edition. – Anthony

Awesome – related articles should include that earlier piece on indoor medical marijuana growth, right?

[Snip. snipsnipsnip. ~dbs, mod.☺]

You mean to say it informs the user of indoor atmosphere condition and it is not based on CO2 ppm. What will the “Team” think?

Timely post Anthony, we were just discussing remote monitoring of a server room here at work and I showed them some of your stuff including:

REPLY: We have that too. See it at http://www.tempelert.com – Anthony

Great item! Our air handlers monitor the air temp in the server room but if they lose power we also lose the ability to monitor server temperatures or send pages that temps are going ballistic. This monitor would solve that problem, and continue to run off of the server room UPS to send pages that the air handlers are down.
Perfect timing and dirt cheap when compared to the cost of toasted servers and down time.
Larry

Malcolm Miller says:
April 12, 2011 at 4:39 pm
What about we Macintosh users?
=====================================
Phhttt. What does a Mac user want to do with a practical application?

Rational Debate says:
April 12, 2011 at 6:30 pm
On a tangent – Anthony or other guru’s here, would one of you please point me to a simple graph that I could use to figure out just how much water I need to run thru a room humidifier to get a room in a house/apartment up to X% humidity? I live in the desert, and would like to be able to use humidity as shown on wunderground.com (or similar sites, which I’m assuming is probably relative humidity), and then be able to know roughly how long to run a humidifier to get the humidity to a reasonable level inside. …

You can use rules of thumb to ballpark it. Air at 80 deg F and 50% humidity near sea level (altitude of Dallas Tx) would hold about 12 oz of water in every 1000 cubic ft of air.
Absolute humidity is measured in grains of water per pound of air (7000 grains = 1 pound)
There are various humidity calculators on line, but to use them properly you need your absolute barometric pressure, and the wet bulb and dry bulb temperatures or the information to work back to those numbers.
http://www.envirochex.com/Psychro.htm
Larry

Server and equipment rooms
Warehouses
Air duct monitoring
Fan monitoring
Greenhouses
Wine cellars
Walk in freezers
Basements (humidity)
Vacation homes
Outside air temp
nice idea but not as useful as it first appears in some areas. It essentially needs a PC running 24/7 *with* a UPS.
The “no batteries to fail” claim is a bit dubious. Since a much more likely event is a power out it needs a PC to have a UPS, in which case the “no batteries” claim is no longer valid.
A/C failure alerter
Heating failure alerter
Hydroponics
Animal farming
Food service refrigerators
Wine cellars
Walk in freezers
Vacation homes
It is not going to provide any of the above functions reliably without a UPS on the PC.
I presume many in the US leave their PC running 24/7 anyway otherwise this would be an enormous waste of energy to run a simple temp/humidity monitor.
Leaving a PC running all year to monitor a vacation home may prove an expensive idea too.
A stand alone device would seem much more reliable and efficient but I’m sure this gadget will appeal as a gift etc.
One other technical aspect I suggest you check is flash burnout. I’ve designed flash based monitoring/logging systems and it’s surprising how quickly the typical 100,000 writes gets eaten up with continual logging.
REPLY: There’s no flash memory in it. And, almost any professional need for such alerting does have a PC running 24/7 I’ll admit though, a vacation home may not have a PC running, but you’d be surprised at the calls we get. We do have a voice dialer system that can run without a PC and uses a mechanical thermostat as a trigger for such purposes. – Anthony

Rational Debate,
Look for a psychrometric chart.
If you know the dry bulb temperature and the wet bulb temperature or the relative humidity, you can look up the amount bywhich the air should be dried/humidified in order to get into your target range. The chart also tell you how much the heat content of the air has to change; ie. the amount of heat that has to be removed or added.
You can assume air pressure to be “standard” unless you’re at high altitude (above 1500 m above MSL) in which caseyou need todo some corrections for different pressure.
If you’re managing the air inside a closed space, then the simplest way is to humidify over-warmed air, chill it so that it saturates and then reheat it to the target temperature without adding further water. The process is easy to control because it depends only on the saturation and target temperatures. It always works but can be energy intensive unless you have heat recovery from the chilling to the reheating to the desired temperature.
e.g. if you wanted 24°C and about 60% RH, you’d heat the air to well above 30°C while adding lots of moisture (e.g. as steam) and then cool the air until it gets to 14.5°C, draining off any condensate. Then re-heat without adding any moisture to 24°C (requiring about 10 kJ/kg dry air). The air then has about 60% RH. (around 11.5 g water/ kg dry air)
Note that if the space in which you’re trying to control the air quality adds only heat, then the RH will drop as the temperature increases. e.g. if it heats to about 30 °C, then RH will be below 40% — heat content rising by about 8 kJ/kg. But if the initial RH had been lower at say 30%, then the same amount of heat would have raised the room temperature to about 32°C on the same quantity of (dry) air.

Anthony,
There are two ways to run WINE. You can run it from within a desktop interface such as gnome or kde etc and then run Windows GUI applications. Or you can run WINE at the command line in LINUX and run all those glorious DOS batch files and executables. It is much more important for my particular type of data center monitoring that I be able to get the temperature and humidity data using LINUX bash scripts, TCL/Expect scripts and then be able to further provide the data to a web server (apache/php). This generally would require a LINUX driver rather than trying to run windows code under WINE. But especially running your Windows GUI program under WINE would require a LINUX desktop rather than the much more command LINUX CLI only. So, I would strongly recommend that you get your wonderful USB device a LINUX hardware driver that can be compiled for any LINUX distribution.

A USB device can be connected to a “plug computer” which consumes only a few (<5W) watts. An old Linksys NSLU2 can do the same with new firmware.
Depending on hardware ports and network availability, such devices can send alerts (and/or logging data) over the Internet, dial-up modem or mobile phone network. If you're in an area with mobile phone coverage, then it's a matter of having a mobile data USB device (with a cheap, pre-paid SIM) to send data via SMS when and as required. The mobile phone device can be "turned off" to consume power when not needed.
Low-level interface documentation is needed however, as a plug computer isn't designed for GUI – though some have hooked up USB-Photoframe, keyboard and mouse just to show how awful it can be.