Yes, that purple line… should not be above the yellow in the summer, when my swamp cooler is suppose to act as a cooler.
But before I discuss that, I want to talk about how I began graphing these data points. It all started when dad bought a z-wave sensor that would tell smartthings: motion, temperature, humidity, and light. During his search for a device driver, he found a complete solution with graph capability and smartthings integration and as much like how most things start out, things are built when there’s a need.
How the graphs were made.
The first thing dad had to build was the influxdb. Following the standard docker influxdb guide, he quickly spun up a influxdb container. Following that, he configured the smartthings smartapp that will push data to the influxdb application. There are some hard coding that must be done to allow the “room” attribute to be pushed forward and you can find the groovy code on GitHub. After running the smartapp on the phone to initiate the db push. Dad quickly logged into the influxdb container and checked if tables and data are being created appropriately. Once data was seen, it was time to graph it with grafana.
Grafana was the same as influxdb. Dad spun a docker container with persistent data saved and the appropriate ports opened. After that it was accessing the grafana interface and making the graph: the type of graph, picking the sources, and formatting the graph appearance.
Back to the Swamp Cooler
So the day the swamp cooler failed, it was a typical work day back when Dog was not brave enough to use her dog door and Dad came home every lunch to let her out. Well he came home one day to find the swamp cooler was off and even more interesting, the controller was off. He went to the electrical panel and saw that the breaker had tripped. Thinking nothing of it, he just reset the breaker, set it to 74 and left to go back to work.
If it wasn’t for grafana and a graph of home/vent temperatures, Dad would not have known that the pump had failed or rather his first assumption was the pump failed. When he left work to go fix his swamp cooler, he dropped by Lowes and bought a new water pump. He went up to the roof and replaced the pump and, at the same time, did the monthly maintenance of flushing the water basin and oiling the sleeve bearings. When he went back inside and got the swamp cooler going again, the pump wasn’t working. Looks like more diagnosis is required and with a voltmeter and checking down the line back to the controller, it looks like when the water pump failed, it took the controller with it.
Luckily, Dad had a spare controller when Mom’s dad donated his controller. After a quick swap, the swamp cooler is back on-line. Although, a mental revisit to making a smart controller might have onset.