If you’ve ever had to be away from home for an extended period of time with no one else staying there, the greatest fear besides having the house broken into is a power outage that can potentially ruin everything that’s inside your refrigerator. A temporary power failure that doesn’t trip the main circuit breaker is not too bad since when the power resumes, power to the fridge is restored automatically.
My home recently suffered one such unfortunate incident. It was during my son’s mid semester break from uni and he left a reasonably stocked fridge to stay with us. I have two IP cams at the house that I check every now and then, both working until the day we visited to spend a long weekend holiday there. There was no power and the circuit breaker had tripped leaving the whole house without power — the fridge had been left without power long enough that when we got there the freezer was warm and an overpowering stench (from thawed meat and other food items) quickly permeated the kitchen and living room.
Two days on my wife and I, after doing everything we could to deodorize every nook and cranny of the fridge, were still looking for a way to prevent a re-occurrence. At first this looked pretty convincing (we were also desperate):
It didn’t take long to figure out that the long term costs involved don’t quite make sense. Later that week, I started looking for alternatives and came across two promising Android apps and settled on Power Failure Monitor. I installed the app on a retired Samsung Galaxy S3 and connected to the home Wi-Fi (without a SIM card). Read how I got everything setup and working beautifully — without needlessly spending a lot of money on this.
Without a SIM card the phone is unable to directly send SMS alerts. To address that, I use a Chrome Extension Gmail SMS Alerts to automatically (service is free) recognize the emails sent by Power Failure Monitor app and convert that to an SMS text message.
Drop me a line if you have found this solution useful.