Does anyone here monitor air conditioners? If so, how do you do it? Up until now, I would find out about an A/C failure by getting temperature alarms from equipment. When I look at the chart of temperature over time it usually looks the A/C fail happened hours (sometimes many hours) before the temperature got critical. It'd be nice to respond sooner.
* My first and cheapest idea was to run another temperature sensor from the rectifier and attach it to the output vent of the air conditioner. I'd trigger an alarm when that exceeds some threshold, say 80F or 85F. * I also looked at fancy controllers with Ethernet and SNMP that'll alert you when the filter is clogged, or detect refrigerant leaks, or whatever. But these all seem to be vendor specific. * Bard makes a couple of Ethernet enabled lead-lag controllers that are generic enough that I could connect them to any A/C unit with terminals for an external thermostat, but these are very limited as to what alarms you'll get. High and low temp alarms, and probably an alarm if the A/C unit is off completely.....which is not a common failure mode in my experience. Basically if you're not adding lead-lag functionality a generic solution doesn't get much any new info. Are there options I'm overlooking? I know mostly nothing about Modbus over TCP for example....would that do anything for me? I actually am pushing for redundant lead-lag systems at new sites, and I can get the controller that goes with those systems. For existing installations I'm thinking the extra temperature sensor is the most sensible thing. Is there a better way that I'm overlooking?
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