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AirGradient Forum

Suggestion for monitoring temp / humidity in attic

#1

Hello,
I was looking to monitor the temperature and humidity levels inside my attic. I recently had my humidistat break and my humidifier was running way more than it should have. This resulted in getting a lot of extra humidity trapped in the attic, which resulted in a bunch of mold problems :frowning:

I’m looking to setup a temperature and humidity monitor in the attic so that I can get alerted if things get out of control again. I was looking for some recommendations. I was wondering if an OpenAir would work in the attic? (I have an indoor one already for my living space). My concern is that the attic gets very very hot in the summer. 140F/60C or hotter. Would the OpenAir handle that? Would I need a special USB adapter that can also handle that type of heat?

Or would it be better to go with some kind of external probes that I can feed into the attic while leaving the actual hardware inside the house?

Ideally I would like to monitor two different locations in the attic. I also want something that’s hard wired so I don’t have to change out batteries.

Any recommendations would be appreciated!

Thanks,
Raul

#2

Hi Raul,

If I were you I would look at the esphome website … they have lots of inexpensive and easy to configure sensors including remote temperature & humidity. To me it feels like an airgradient unit may be a bit overkill. I started using esphome a few months back and have lots of sensors setup already so its all pretty straightforward and low cost.

#3

I went with a few M5 stack ESP32 PoE and the SHT40 combo unit. I flashed them with ESPHome using the following guide and then I added them into home assistant. It was all surprisingly easy and it just worked. Thanks again for the suggestion!

Now I just have to figure out my alerting parameters. I want to alert if the attic is overly humid and at risk of growing mold. It’s crazy how much relative humidity moves around. I think I probably need an outdoor sensor (OpenAir) so I can compare the difference between the absolute? or relative? humidity between the attic and the outdoors? If the delta is > X for Y amount of time, then I should alert… maybe? Or maybe alert if the dew point of the attic is > the outside temperature.