I had been away on a summer vacation for more than ten days when I happened to read an article.
It described someone's pet shrimp turning red in an aquarium during extreme summer heat.
I immediately thought about the aquarium back at home. I had been away for over ten days. Was everything still all right?
I had already automated the cooling fan
Earlier, I had set up a simple automation to turn on a fan when the room got hot.
I had looked for a Zigbee sensor that could measure the aquarium's water temperature directly, but had not found one I liked. Instead, I used the indoor-temperature reading from the air conditioner in SmartThings.
An external computer USB cooling fan sat above the tank. A Zigbee smart plug switched it on when the room reached the temperature condition I had set.
I liked using that routine at home. But after reading the article, I suddenly wondered whether it would be enough while nobody was there.
I checked the temperature history in SmartThings
During the holiday I opened SmartThings and looked at the indoor-temperature timeline.
I found periods when the temperature had climbed quite high. When I was home, I usually used the air conditioner during those hours, so I had not paid much attention to the pattern.
I did not want the air conditioner running throughout the holiday.
The next day, around the time when the earlier peak had occurred, I switched on the AC remotely for a little while.
I did this on about two days during the trip, for short periods rather than continuously.
What I found when I got home
When I returned, I checked the aquarium.
Fortunately, the animals were all fine.
I suspect the fan that had been running automatically helped a lot. I do not know how much difference those brief periods of air conditioning made, but the problem I had feared had not happened.
I did notice one change: the water level was much lower than usual.
Perhaps the constant airflow from the USB fan had increased evaporation. I was simply relieved to find the aquarium's inhabitants doing well.
When I first built the routine, I only thought about switching the fan on automatically during hot weather. I had not expected an article read during a holiday to send me searching through temperature history and switching on the air conditioner from far away.