Long range temperature monitoring

[Tommy Boy]

I have a neighbor across the street that has a log cabin and a lot of property with a natural gas well on the property and he gets free gas from it. He leaves the gas on all the time and runs the furnace all the time in the cabin as well. Sometimes the gas will go out when they do maintenance on the gas well and the furnace will shut off in the house so he has a temperature controlled weather alarm like this that turns on a red light in the front window if the temperature drops below 45 degrees in the house and I can see the light from my house across the street. He's not there all the time, he lives about 2 hours away and the reason he does this is the first winter after he built the cabin the gas went out and froze all the pipes in the house and he had to replace all the pipes in the house, he said it was a real pain in the neck, which I can see.

Now, what I would like to know is, is there anyway I can monitor the temperature inside the house from my house across the street, probably around 350 - 400 feet away? Just so I wouldn't have to walk over there if the red light comes on because it sometimes gives false alarms because it isn't real reliable. I would like to be able to just look and see what the temperature is in the house so I can be sure of what the temperature is in the house.

I know there are weather stations that will go like 330 feet, do those work well? Does anyone have any experience using them long range? Is there anything else that anyone knows about? I don't want to spend tons of money on it either.

 

[root]

a mercury thermometer and a telescope?

more seriously we use a device like the ones listed here Computer Room Environmental Monitoring to monitor the temperature in our data centres.
(we use SNMP, but on most there is a web server built in).

you could also just do down your local maplin/radioshack and build a temperature alarm

 

[Tommy Boy]

I was just thinking about a telescope and a thermometer.

How much do those units cost that you posted in your link?

The weather alarm is actually not a bad idea, can you give me some insight on how to build one?

 

[JCB1]

thermometer and a web cam??

 

[Legodude522]

I have some experience with Davis weather stations. The Vantage Pro 2 series uses 2.4ghz wireless and you can use a long range antenna with it. This would be more on the pricey side though but if you got questions about some of their equipment, I may be able to help.

Disclaimer: I work in the environmental monitoring industry

 

[Neodude1123201]

An Arduino, some temperature sensors and a Xbee Wireless shield maybe?

 

[setishock]

Those wireless cameras that come as a kit work well over line of site. You can get them in 2.4 or 5 ghz. Make sure you get the ones that are set to not interfere with wireless internet. The old ones would wipe out wireless networking for a far amount of distance. They fixed that by going sideband.
Set up a large thermomiter, point the camera at it, and you're good on that end. On the recv end install a high gain antenna and plug the recv in to a vacant video in on your tv.
Between beers check on the cabin camera. I've seen those kits go as cheap 70 dollars US. And the pic for black and white is not too shabby.

 

[Tommy Boy]

Everything has been alright with the cabin lately and winter is almost over so I'm not going to worry about it too much this year.

Some of your suggestions sound good but seem expensive. I didn't mention that there is no phone line over there so anything dealing with internet isn't going to work. They don't have phone service there because of cell phones, and it's just a cabin.

 

[root]

doesn't have to be internet, you can just bury a length of cat 5 in the ground.