Power/Internet loss notifications

[jmed999]

I have and Elk M1G and an ISY. I'm soon going to have the M1XEP, router, modem, and ISY on UPS. The Elk will not be on UPS but does have a backup battery.

With that said, what is the best way to get the ISY to notify me when I lose normal power (start UPS), regain normal power (get off the UPS), lose internet, regain internet?

Can I just make rules for those 4 things to change 2 outputs (on and off) then program the ISY to send notifications when those outputs change?

Any ideas?

Thanks Guys!

 

[jmed999]

Anyone?

 

[jhdale]

The ISY isn't going to directly know you lost power. If you allow the ISY to lose power, I believe you could have it notify you when power is restored. Failing that, I think the best solution I can brainstorm would be to use a device with sense (e.g. inlinelinc with sense), have that device powered via the UPS, but connect the sense wires to power not coming through the UPS. Then when power is lost, the device will turn off due to the sense wires losing power, and tell the ISY. (I'm not sure about the isolation of the sense wires. For safety reasons it might be necessary to have the sense wires connected to the same circuit as the UPS.)

Detecting internet is a little harder. Do you want to be notified about this while you are at home, or away? Letting you know there is no internet when you are away from home is difficult since there's no internet... I imagine you could in principle set up a network service that communicates internet status to ISY via the REST interface, but that would depend on having some other device (e.g. a computer) to run the service on. Googling comes up with things like this: https://code.google....ctivitymonitor/ or http://www.netuptimemonitor.com/

From a hardware perspective, it's possible you could do something with a remote power switch e.g. http://3gstore.com/p...ote_switch.html (also randomly selected from a net search) perhaps also needing to be connected to an Insteon device via sense wires.

 

[jmed999]

Thanks! The AC power loss notification was easy...I just created a rule so the ELK will change an output when it loses AC. Then I created a program for the ISY to notify me via a text when that output is turned on (power loss) and another when the output is turned off (power restored)

Not sure if I can do the internet the same way (with an Elk rule and ISY program) or not.

Any ideas?

 

[gatchel]

The only way would be to have a "live program" of sorts ping a internet site or sites and have the notification come when a certian number of pings are no reply. The problem is that once internet is down, how do you get the notification with out a backup.

IP monitoring solutions have a "heartbeat" and can provide the notification from the other direction..AFAIK...