Hi guys!
I’m really intrested in buying a Vera, but I just have a short and simple question first. Is it possible to get the Vera send for example a mail if the power goes down in my house? I guess it would be possible due to its batteries. ???
The Battery that Vera2 comes with is more for temporary use, to move it to a location within a house in order to “pair” it with a ZWave device (Lock, Switch, etc) that may be beyond the immediate reach of Zwave in it’s “regular” location in your home.
To do what you’re looking for, you’d need to have all the components attached to some sort of UPS to power them when the house-power is lost.
The UPS would need to power the Vera unit, DSL/Cable Modem and any Routers/Switches that are between your DSL/Cable Modem and the Vera.
Once those bits were in place, you’d still need a mechanism to detect power to the House was lost.
eg. … Polling of a ZWave Plugin module (which would fail when power was down), a Luup plugin for the UPS itself (etc).
I’ve not seen anyone implement the complete solution yet, although a number of people do keep their Vera units on UPS to ensure power is supplied through a house power-down situation.
I’m guessing here, but I believe you can set it up so the server emails or sends a text to you when your Vera is down. Now I know that doesn’t exactly mean you have lost power at that location, but couldn’t you simply call that location if you receive a notification that your Vera is down and if there is no power, your answering machine won’t pick up? Not perfect, but better than nothing and you don’t have to buy anything extra other than perhaps an inexpensive answering machine if you don’t have one. (If the answering machine does pick up, then you do have power and your Vera is down for some other reason)
[quote=“guessed, post:2, topic:166579”]The Battery that Vera2 comes with is more for temporary use, to move it to a location within a house in order to “pair” it with a ZWave device (Lock, Switch, etc) that may be beyond the immediate reach of Zwave in it’s “regular” location in your home.
To do what you’re looking for, you’d need to have all the components attached to some sort of UPS to power them when the house-power is lost.
The UPS would need to power the Vera unit, DSL/Cable Modem and any Routers/Switches that are between your DSL/Cable Modem and the Vera.
Once those bits were in place, you’d still need a mechanism to detect power to the House was lost.
eg. … Polling of a ZWave Plugin module (which would fail when power was down), a Luup plugin for the UPS itself (etc).
I’ve not seen anyone implement the complete solution yet, although a number of people do keep their Vera units on UPS to ensure power is supplied through a house power-down situation.[/quote]
I like your use o a Luup plug -in here . I think that could be do able.
THe module thing could be an issue. I wonder if something could be added to the Zwave plug strip.
You could also run the ping sensor on something else that isn’t on the same circuit as Vera, like a camera or something else. It wouldn’t necessarily mean that the power had gone because I guess it could crash… However you could have that powered by an appliance module so that it could be cycled as a check if you get an alert!?
UPS seems to be a smart and simple solution. Alot of UPS (if not all ow them) are able to send email then the main power is loss. Even the simplest UPS with mail support will be able to hold up the Vera for several hours I guess.
We running our SBS 2003 server (HP Ml110 G5) , modems , routers , some indication LED lights in the hallway and vera on a quit simple UPS.
The can even run for a few hours.
The Ups is 1600Va
The complete setup is running for 14% UPS load.
Proberly the UPS was about 120 euro
Marco
Not a programmer so I might not be looking at this like everyone else but couldn’t the website just detect when it lost contact with the unit in the house and send an email?
Or use a service like Pingdom (http://www.pingdom.com/). It can ping the device every minute and send sms/mail etc if the ping package don’t return.
But my initial question was regarding the Vera is able to fire of an alarm (siren) in case of powerloss without Internet connection at all. I don’t think it possible but had to ask. Maybe there is some super clever way to solve this :
The Ups fires a alarm true smtp.
Maby it would be possible to send it to vera ( true a serial connection or netwerk)
Depending on the type of UPS
Note that a lot of household UPS devices come with a USB port that acts as a Human Interface Device (HID). I don’t know whether the Vera has the OpenWRT packages that let it talk to USB HID connections. If it did, that’d be an option.