How To Monitor if Device is Offline

Community Playground Scenes & Automations
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#1

I could not find a way to natively do this. Here’s my use case:

  1. I have an outdoor freezer
  2. Freezer is plugged into a standard GFCI outlet
  3. occasionally the GFCI trips and I don’t know until I notice the freezer appears off the next time I use it. This has happened about 2 times in 3 years.
  4. I purchased a power plug like this: Amazon.com in order to find out when the GFCI trips and to monitor power consumption

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Issue: there’s no native way I was able to determine from Vera to “notify when device offline” so I had to get creative.

Fix: Installed Reactor App and build 2 simple “sensors”

Sensor 1: This is the one that I use to actively poll my device:


Sensor 2: This is the one I use to check on the failed consecutive poll attempts and send me a notification if too many fail


You would want to tweak how often you notify and poll based on your requirements. My notification in my example will notify me hourly once 5 or more consecutive poll attempts fail. I poll every 10 minutes so basically I will know if the freezer is offline for an hour or more. That was sufficient for my requirements.

Hope this helps someone else.

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#2

Lol! I have the literal exact same issue and near exact same reactor sensors…haha!

#3

You should have posted :slight_smile: would have saved me some time figuring it out! At least this will be here for future googlers…

#4

Lol, sorry. Never thought about it for this one. :slight_smile:

#5

Just to point out for future folks as well… there’s no reason this cannot all be done in two groups inside just one ReactorSensor.

#6

That did not occur to me. Maybe because I just started using it. I’ll probably revise my setup tonight. Thanks for the heads up.

1 Like