alt Hacker NewsI put the Ikea Thread sensor in my fridge a while back and it's been a lot more useful than I expected. My fridge had been periodically getting too cold or too hot, I suspect the issue is that the captive touch buttons that control the temp get occasionally bumped, changing the set temperature. With the thread sensor I can have Home Assistant send me an alert when the fridge leaves the safe zone for too long so I can manually correct it.
It's also been interesting to see when placing hot food in the fridge how long the temperature stays elevated for. I put the sensor in a ziplock bag and sucked the air out of it so it has weatherproofing.
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Did the exact same thing, which is how I discovered our fridge was actually staying around 10-15 deg Celsius inside for half the summer.
Recommend this exercise to everyone.
And it communicates OK to outside the fridge? I would have thought a fridge is pretty close to a Faraday cage
Thats a cool (!) idea. A zigbee knob + a PID loop would be a nice complement.
Did you make sure those hot peaks are not your fridge's defrost cycle?
I've worked in grocery retail, and this is exactly the boring problem that quietly eats money: a fridge drifts a couple of degrees overnight and nobody notices until the stock has to go in the bin. a cheap sensor with an alert for "out of range for 20+ minutes" pays for itself the first time it fires. the "too long" part matters more than precision, door openings make single readings useless
I had issues with my garage fridge last year. Took a while to figure out, but there was a small box at the bottom that was occasionally keeping the door from closing completely. The Zigbee sensor was great tracking what happened when and helping me narrow down the cause.