Elk monitored temperature sensor 400 - 800 deg?

[relay]

Hi there,

I am installing a wood burning insert into my fireplace shortly and that got me thinking about the posability of having my Elk M1 alerting me to an undfire or overfire condition in my stove. Basically, you want to keep a wood stove burning between 400 to 600 degrees for proper usage.
If the stove drops below the 300 degree range, then either your running low on wood or your not burning right and potentially creating dangerous creosote in your chimney. At 700 + you are getting dangerously close to overfiring the stove and have glowing red metal in your house. Neither is good. Since the stove has the ability to burn up to 12 hours on a load, it is unlikely that we will be watching it carefully for the entire time, especially overnight.

Does anyone know of a remote temp. sensor with the kind of range needed for this application? Wireless would be better as the fireplace is all brick and no easy way to run wire to it. it would need to be a physical contact sensor that could be place on the stove surface to monitor the temp.
I also have a Isy99i and Insteon infrastructure in place if there is anything in that world that might work.
I have several Insteon thermostats that can monitor room temp but that does not help too much.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

 

[JimS]

I have been thinking about woodstove monitoring too but I don't need wireless and won't be hooking to an Elk. For this temperature range thermocouples work well. Since the temperature accuracy needed is pretty loose things like cold junction temperature compensation are not really needed or could be very crude. A good,low offset op amp is about all that is needed if you have an analog input. I planned to roll my own.

If you are so inclined Microchip has a good ap note:
http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/AppNotes/00844a.pdf

Although I was thinking of using a diode for cold junction temp ...

Woodstove season will be here before you know it!

 

[CAI_Support]

It is difficult to mount a thermal couple temperature sensor in this situation. Where you installed it to may not really have the temperature you want to measure. If you could do some soldering, you may get an infraread receiver diode, like this one:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/140472964725
Hook it up to a transistor to amplify its output, then measure its value use an AD converter.
That is how most metal refineray do -- non contact temperature measuring.

 

[Spanky]

Since the stove radiates heat, a standard sensor placed some distance away may be an easier solution than trying to mount the sensor directly on the stove.