RE: Where's the Heat? Blog #2

ntewinkel — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 17:06:25 GMT

Very cool to see your results!

It's amazing how much insight we can gain by adding sensors and tracking the readings [emoticon:c4563cd7d5574777a71c318021cbbcc8]

RE: Where's the Heat? Blog #2

dougw — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 16:30:23 GMT

Interesting project.

RE: Where's the Heat? Blog #2

shabaz — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 00:11:32 GMT

Hi Mike,

I too agree that temperature sensors (and thermistors are good) should be part of all starter kits : ) It's such an important measurement. And a lot of (cheap) silicon sensors are not great in their thick plastic packages.

I too want to build some wireless temperature sensors at some point, simply because it might help me better save energy (costs are through the roof and going to get worse of course). By the way, on an unrelated project, I got a large TFT working with the Pico, so if you wanted to extend that display for more nodes, that could be an approach. I used a 'RA8875' display, they are available from AliExpress and from buydisplay.com.

Your environment got me thinking of server rooms, and their challenges. At a place I worked, I believe they had vents on the floor, i.e. the floor was raised and they could replace tiles with gridded ones underneath the server cabinets, but I can imagine that's only feasible for very large new server rooms. I know very little about server room cooling however.

It was interesting to see the temperature differences in a room, and that in your case the height mattered significantly! It's a very good idea to have multiple temperature sensors in rooms. A lot of traditional building sensors are really just measuring the temperature close to a wall. A person in a room can noticeably feel comfortable, or uncomfortable, merely by moving their location in a room, e.g. by sitting close to a wall or window, or elsewhere, and yet I bet many people don't realize how uncomfortable they are until hours later, because they are concentrating on other things.