As many know, I create instrumentation and display systems that do a wide variety of weather monitoring tasks. Usually I focus on weather and climate measurement in situ.
Now, I have something useful for alerting you to problems of mission critical indoor climate. Please forgive this diversion to a commercial message, but I think that there are many readers that might benefit from this new gadget, or know somebody who might. If you are not interested, just skip over this. Thanks – Anthony
TempElertUSB Offers real-time alerting of temperature and humidity conditions for mission critical applications. Only $99
NEW: Temperature and hygrometer device called TempElertUSB which can alert via email, pager, cell phones of any over/under temperature, humidity, and dewpoint conditions which may affect the safe operation of mission critical operations such as server rooms, food storage systems, greenhouses, warehouses, and process control applications.
The devices features a simple 1 minute installation and setup, requiring no special skills beyond knowing your email account settings.
Even then, the included software offers an import feature for Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express to import account settings. For manual message alert setup, a helpful email configuration wizard is provided. Messaging from TempElertUSB is supported on most popular mobile messaging platforms including iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Alphanumeric Pagers, Email enabled cellphones, and standard SMTP/POP3 email accounts.
When plugged into any USB 1.1/2.0 port of a PC, Windows will automatically install a driver. After installing the software from the CD-ROM provided, TempElertUSB measures temperature and relative humidity from -20 to +70°C (-4 to +158°F) and 0 to 100%RH. The software displays the temperature, humidity and dew point (the temperature at which water vapor present in the air begins to condense) in real-time and saves it to a file which can store up to 7 day’s worth of data. This data file is overwritten at the beginning of each new logging session. The software provides the option for the user to save the data file permanently to the hard-drive. Temperature, relative humidity and dew point can be graphed, printed and exported to other applications.
An export to Excel feature is built in to the software. A test button allows you to test email/cell phone/pager messaging prior to deployment.
TempElertUSB can be set to monitor over and under temperature, dewpoint, and humidity alarm conditions, then alert you several ways:
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Visually on screen
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Audibly via computer speaker
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Via Email
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Via pager
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Via cellphone
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Via mailing list server
The sensor can be extended away from the PC using optional USB extender cables up to 5 meters (16 feet) or using our optional Cat5/6 USB adapter, guaranteed up to 50 meters (150 feet) with maximum possible use to 100 meters (300 feet) on a dedicated cable.
Easy to install and use, the control software runs under Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Windows7, and Server 2003/2008. It provides a display which can view the current temperature and humidity and graph either the current live data or logged data files. The software can also show the current temperature and humidity in the notification area within the Windows tool-bar. Right-clicking on the TempElertUSB icon in the notification
area enables the user to access the full functionality of the software. Users can assign high and low alarms within the software which can send emails, text alerts or audible alarms via the PC’s internal speaker.
Pricing in singles is $99 with volume discounts available. Government and educational purchase orders are accepted.
TempElertUSB_Data_Sheet (PDF)
 Instant Real time temperature alerts: email, cell, pager |
Plug and Play – no drivers needed |
| Powered from USB port – no batteries to fail |
Monitors temperature, humidity, & dewpoint |
| 1 year warranty, free support |
Runs in background, logs data, Excel export |
Features at a glance:
- Temperature and humidity email alerts issued in real-time
- -20 to +70°C (-4 to +158°F) measurement range for temperature and dewpoint, 0 to 100% relative humidity measurement range
- User-Programmable alarm thresholds for temperature & RH%, plus dewpoint
- Can also message to most any cell phone, pager, or other email/messaging enabled hand-held device
- Runs automatically as Windows starts
- Stays minimized in the system tray unless you want to view the live data screen
- Logs all temperature, humidity, and dewpoint readings to disk automatically every second
- Intelligent logging system writes only new data, preventing huge file sizes
- Real-time temperature, humidity, and dewpoint graphs
- Display and alert on Celsius or Fahrenheit settings
- Audible alarm on alerts
- Can email the log once every 24 hours to any email address
- Export data to Excel feature built in
- Support for SMTP and SSL email server authentication
- Email test button to ensure you get it right
- Ability to send to alerts to one or more email addresses
- Includes an import wizard to automatically import your email account settings (see the screenshots page)
- Runs on Windows 2000, WindowsXP, Server2003/2008, Vista, and Windows 7
- Blue LED activity indicator on the TempElertUSB tells you it is operating
- Can be extended away from the PC to the monitoring location via USB cable or Cat5 cable with our optional accessories
Includes:
- TempElertUSB sensor unit
- TempElertUSB Windows software on CD-ROM
- PowerBug remote system shutdown software on CD ROM
- Quick Install Guide
- Printable Manual on CD and within the program
- Storage case
The TempElertUSB Digital Alerting Thermometer and Hygrometer can be used for:
- Server and equipment rooms
- Warehouses
- Air duct monitoring
- Fan monitoring
- Greenhouses
- Wine cellars
- Walk in freezers
- Basements (humidity)
- Vacation homes
- Outside air temp
- Comfort monitoring
- A/C failure alerter
- Heating failure alerter
- Mildew conditions alert
- Worker environment alert
- Hydroponics
- Animal farming
- Food service refrigerators
Learn more about it at www.tempelertusb.com
For 99 bucks, it is pretty cheap peace of mind for things that can go wrong costing thousands.
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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
James Sexton says:
April 12, 2011 at 6:32 pm
“Malcolm Miller says:
April 12, 2011 at 4:39 pm
‘What about we [sic] Macintosh users?’
=====================================
Phhttt. What does a Mac user want to do with a practical application?”
Now that’s a hoot! Of course, I’d add Windows and its (MSFT’s) many proprietary formats to that. (I’ll admit that W7 seems to have got more things right than any previous version; not that that’s saying a whole bunch. ;p)
cheers,
gary
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
James Sexton says:
April 12, 2011 at 6:45 pm
REPLY: Are you talking about the USB or the multichannel IP/ network version? – Anthony
—————————————————————————-
Hmm, I think that answers my questions. We should be in contact soon for a small order.
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.
I guess I’m a little disappointed there is no mention of Accuracy and/or Calibration for the RH measurement. Mass consumer devices can be notoriously off when it comes to RH%.
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.
CJN says:
Download the data sheet from the unit’s web site. Accuracy is documented.
Calibration would be a process that’s run against a precision control in a controlled environment. That’s not of concern to most users and probably beyond what they’d want to spend.
(I fixed the spellink of my name this time.)
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.
PaulH says:
April 12, 2011 at 4:14 pm
“A device like this to monitor the operation of my sump pump would be very handy.”
I had a wireless gimcrack in the bilge of my houseboat that communicated the water level to the houseboat’s desktop (Windows) computer. I also had indoor and outdoor wireless temp sensors, wireless digital compass, wireless GPS, wireless wind speed and direction, plus a few video cameras. The houseboat PC had “PC Anywhere” installed on it so I could check the status of any of those sensors or cameras from any other internet connected PC anywhere in the world.