Deep Freezer remote thermometer for those that travel often?

Posted by throwaway_Golf_Help@reddit | preppers | View on Reddit | 21 comments

I have a chest freezer that recently lost power due to the power cord's natural weight pulling the plug out of a garage outlet. I was unaware because I only open the freezer once or so per week to pull food out for the week. I only knew this because of a bag of ice that was also in the freezer had melted just enough to show signs of thawing, so naturally I fixed the outlet issue with a 90-degree outlet adaptor... but that made me realize another problem: I travel for work. Very often. typically for short periods but occasionally for up to 5-10 days, so if i rarely open the deep freezer then all my frozen meat/goods might go bad before I realize it. I have been trying to find either a thermometer (or more ideally a smart outlet) that will alert my phone if the power is lost to this one outlet. There are many of these out there but most of the thermometers sound off a 90db alarm, which could be annoying to my neighbors if i happen to be out of town, and many of the alternatives only connect directly do your phone instead of to the wifi in order to notify you via an app. Have any of you had any luck with a thermometer or smart plug for a deep freezer? I'm mostly intersted in loss of power, but the thermometers with the temperature graphs are cool too.

21 Comments

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Virtual-Feature-9747@reddit

I use Govee Wi-Fi temperature sensors. There is an phone app for real time monitoring and it will send an email alert when a threshold temperature is reached.

ryan112ryan@reddit

Came here to say this, just setup mine a few weeks ago and we had two power outages while I was away. Saved me general hours of driving because the freezer only rose to 15 degrees for a few hours, that had everything still frozen. https://preview.redd.it/iqhwe0m5ajjf1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e804646ff3aecbd92c773d1a07cb1786f0647d10

Sometimes_Wright@reddit

and for the frugal non IT people out there. Freeze a cup of water and put a penny on top after it freeze. If you open your freezer and the penny is at the bottom of the cup you had an outage and need to check your food.

A_happy_otter@reddit

Or put an ice cube somewhere outside of the mold and if it's gone it melted

Ryan_e3p@reddit

Home Assistant is once again a solution for this. A couple ways to do this: 1. While there isn't a Z-wave device that has a probe for it for this application, but [there is a Zigbee device](https://www.ebay.com/itm/297424560125) that does! Home Assistant can send you notifications remotely so you can ask your neighbors if they can check on it, rather than wait for them to be annoyed by an alarm going off. 2. Another option is a smart plug that has a load sensor on it. [This one also connects to a Zigbee receive](https://www.amazon.com/Aqara-12LM-ZNCZ-Smart-White/dp/B07CJ2MM6Z)r, and can tell you if there is power supplied to the plug, as well as record loads (which can help you determine if the freezer dies before temps start to rise). A combination of the two wouldn't be the worst idea, either.

Iron_Eagl@reddit

There's also Ecobee sensors, I use them because they have probes and that lets me keep the batteries outside the freezer. They also have a local display, which can come in handy if the power goes out and you want to monitor temps.

Those are another option, but only provide data for as long as your phone is on your home wifi and using their wifi gateway. With the app and everything else being closed-source, it's a bit of a turn off for me since everything working is at the whim of Ecowitt supporting all the software.

Oh, I have them integrated into home assistant - I didn't even know there was an app.

mrhemingray@reddit

We have an Abode security system with several temperature & humidity sensors and we put those in the freezers when we're out of town. We can set up automation to alert us when temperature falls outside set ranges. The system itself will also alert us if power is lost. Another "low tech" hack I heard about and I'm planning on trying is placing coins in an ice cube tray, filling them with water until they freeze, then take them out and flip them over. If the freezer ever loses power to the point that things melt, the coin will be at the bottom.

Acceptable_Dust7149@reddit

I just got my friend wifi thermometer from Thermoworks. It sends an alert.

Bogus_Walrus@reddit

YoLink hub/thermometers have worked well for us. I set the temp alarm to warn me if temps get above 15°F. That gives me time to figure out why temp is rising. We also installed Sense system to monitor power use and also a simple Ting that will alert us of power surges and drops.

HomersDonut1440@reddit

I second the YoLink. After losing 2 freezers of meat due to unfortunate plug issues, I spent the $50 on a hub and 2 sensors. Now the fridge and freezer both have a sensor with custom parameters for alerts, that notify my phone if the temp goes outside of those ranges. They are Wi-Fi units, obviously, so if power goes out to your house then they do you no good. But, when you try to get a live reading from them on your phone you’ll see they aren’t connecting which will tell you the power is out.

True_Fill9440@reddit

I Third YoLink.

DIYnivor@reddit

I have [this](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07XD68GX6). It doesn't notify or have an app, but it does keep track of the maximum temperature, so I can look when I get back to see if it has had a problem. I've been thinking about trying to integrate this into my Home Assistant. Maybe using SDR to read the wireless signals directly (if possible), or make something that listens for the alarm (similar to a device I have that listens for my smoke and CO alarms, and alerts me through Home Assistant).

IDDMaximus@reddit

Have been thinking about this as well, but yet to pull the trigger. Considering Thermoworks NODE lineup for remote monitoring with push notifications, either the NODE WiFi entry level model or the NODE cold-holding buffered probe kit. Thermoworks has been reliable for kitchen/grill/smoker monitoring, which is why I'm leaning towards them for freezer monitoring.

SomeDudeInGermany@reddit

My low cost solution was to turn on beeping appliance sound detection in the Echo Show that’s in the kitchen. When the thermometer starts beeping I get an alert on my phone.

big_bob_c@reddit

In addition to whatever monitoring you figure out, I would replace that outlet. If it's loose enough that the plug pulls out under the weight of the cord, it's loose enough to have a bad contact with the plug.

bikumz@reddit

I’m confused what this will fix. Are you going to travel back home from work because your deep freeze stops getting power? I tried one of these, and they are more so for blown fuses not for total power outages. The ones I tried relied on WiFi so if the whole house lost power it wouldn’t be any good anyway. My cousin has one of the ones that uses a subscription, but personally I just don’t like the idea of relying on basically cell phone reception and a server to alert me. I think his is more of a general like smart outlet not designed specially for deep freeze. It’s a pretty neat device and monitors stuff like temps in the home but as mentioned don’t like the idea of relying on multiple outside factors. My personal solution was just checking in with neighbors through text to see if we lost power during a storm or something. Cameras you can access remotely are great too as hey if I can’t pull them up most likely lost power.

Twelve-Foot@reddit

Could call a friend or relative and ask them to go check on it.

OperationMobocracy@reddit

I bought a product called "TempStick". It's about half the size of a banana, runs on 2 lithium AA batteries and connects via wifi. You can see the stats online (no subscription required). It only checks in with the cloud every hour (you can set it more frequent, but at the cost of battery consumption) but at this rate the batteries last a long time. I bought one almost two years ago for use at work in a computer room and it still shows full battery strength. The one in my chest freezer at home is down to 83% battery, but I think some of this is to be expected (operating at 5F not 75F, inside of a metal box requiring more wifi signal power vs. being 6 ft from an AP at work), but a pair of AA lithium every 9-12 months isn't exactly expensive. They have a variant that will run off an AC power adapter and will produce warnings for loss of power. Of course this runs into the conceptual problem of whole-house loss of power which impact your ability even send an alert. You can set a lost connection alert which I think triggers an alert if it doesn't check in on schedule (I have it set, but haven't gotten an alert like this yet). I have it for run of the mill freezer issues -- tripped breaker, machine on the fritz, things I can respond to realistically in a couple of hours when I'm generally around. I have a dozen 2L plastic bottles filled with water in my freezer to help keep the temp down in a power loss situation. ChatGPT tells me this buys me about 3 extra hours under 20F. I also have a Tapo wifi power outlet switch on it which monitors energy. It sucks about 900 watts a day in my garage in July, so providing long-duration power (more than a few hours) involves a generator or multiple batteries and solar. Not worth it for a few hundred dollars in food, and the last time we had a longer outage I just spent $50 on dry ice.

capinredbeard22@reddit

Not my project, but I saw this not too long ago and want to do something similar: https://hackaday.com/2025/05/19/overengineered-freezer-monitor-fills-market-void/

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