As the founder of “The network monitoring company” Paessler AG it came quite natural to me to not only monitor our home network but also various environmental metrics in our family home. We had moved into our new home a year and a half ago and having temperature data series has been quite helpful to do the fine tuning and bug-fixing of the heating and venting systems.

I am not so much a maker person like my colleagues who built their own smart thermometers for our office building. I like to use prefabricated devices. So I ordered 6 different out-of-the-box devices (mostly from Amazon) to monitor temperatures etc. in our house. I connected all these sensors to my PRTG installation which also monitors the heating system and solar panels via ModbusTCP and many other systems of the house.

Here is an overview of the sensor devices I am using:

With PRTG I can do “live” monitoring of things, e.g. environmental stuff like the current sunlight (solar panels), my heating system and temperatures throughout the building. I also wanted to add a look into the future so I looked around for a html widget to display the weather outlook that I could add to my PRTG maps.

The power saving feature “connected standby” of Windows 10 causes PCs to go offline from Teamviewer, so you can’t wake them up and connect/control them. But there is a trick that stops this behavior.