How to be Notified of Events or a Power Outage at a Remote Home

Issue #32

The Problem:

If you have a remote property, say a vacation home, cabin, or your parent's home, you may want to be remotely notified of events or if there is a power outage. This could be helpful if you are worried about your parents' temperature limits, freezing pipes, water leak detection, or potential intruders at your property that motion or door contact sensors could detect.

This could also be used if you have a parked or stored RV with no Internet connection or need to evacuate your home due to hurricane or fire alerts.

The Solution:

Since a power outage will most likely take out the Internet connection, it would be helpful to have a battery-powered cellular connection to not only alert you of the power loss but also to provide you with access to temperature, water leak, motion detection, and door contact sensors.

YoLink provides such a solution through their new LTE-based Hub 3, which has a backup battery and a cellular connection. This can be used with their regular LoRa-based sensors, which do not require Wi-Fi or any other power-based hub such as ZigBee. As of the publication of this article, the YoLink Hub 3 does not provide a power-loss notification, but this function can be added through the use of a "YoLink Smart Power Fail Alarm, AC Power Outage Alert," which can provide the AC power loss notification through the YoLink Hub 3.

The YoLink Hub 3 has a built-in SIM card and provides non-contract LTE service at $6.99/month.

This hub could also be useful for a parent's home without Internet access, such as those with only cable TV and a landline/flip phone. It could also be helpful to preconfigure and drop ship a system to your parent's home that requires no Internet access at their home.

The LTE connection supports full-time use, and this hub could be used to support their various sensors.

Here is a YouTube video of it in action:

Ordering details on the YoLink devices can be found in the YouTube video description: