No guarantees, but this works beautifully for me..
I live in a region known for power outages so when I am away from home it gives me peace of mind having a notification of an outage. I'm usually never more than an hour away from home and would prefer to head back home and check my tank when notified. Even another step further I have a UPS that will power my pumps for some time during an outage.
Limitations: This is basically a trick that monitors your internet router at home. It goes on the assumption that if your internet router is down or unreachable that you have lost power at your house. Unless you have a horrible service provider this should be an accurate way to detect outages at home.
Basically all you need is a monitoring service with txt messaging capability such as Alertra http://www.alertra.com I find them very reliable and use them for monitoring some of my business servers (There should be free or cheaper alternatives out there as well).
1. Setup your monitoring service account.
2. Setup a 'device' to monitor (this will be your home internet router)
3. Get the ip address of your router by going here: http://www.whatismyip.com
4. Setup your monitoring service to ping the ip address you obtained in step 3 (I have it ping my address every 20 minutes)
5. Setup your monitoring service to txt you if the ping fails
6. Unplug your router and do a test, you should be notified of the outage
Tips: You may have a static ip address which never changes, this is ideal. If you have a dynamic ip address then every time your internet router is restarted the address will change. Ensure you keep your current ip address in sync with what the monitoring service is monitoring.
Have fun
I live in a region known for power outages so when I am away from home it gives me peace of mind having a notification of an outage. I'm usually never more than an hour away from home and would prefer to head back home and check my tank when notified. Even another step further I have a UPS that will power my pumps for some time during an outage.
Limitations: This is basically a trick that monitors your internet router at home. It goes on the assumption that if your internet router is down or unreachable that you have lost power at your house. Unless you have a horrible service provider this should be an accurate way to detect outages at home.
Basically all you need is a monitoring service with txt messaging capability such as Alertra http://www.alertra.com I find them very reliable and use them for monitoring some of my business servers (There should be free or cheaper alternatives out there as well).
1. Setup your monitoring service account.
2. Setup a 'device' to monitor (this will be your home internet router)
3. Get the ip address of your router by going here: http://www.whatismyip.com
4. Setup your monitoring service to ping the ip address you obtained in step 3 (I have it ping my address every 20 minutes)
5. Setup your monitoring service to txt you if the ping fails
6. Unplug your router and do a test, you should be notified of the outage
Tips: You may have a static ip address which never changes, this is ideal. If you have a dynamic ip address then every time your internet router is restarted the address will change. Ensure you keep your current ip address in sync with what the monitoring service is monitoring.
Have fun
