Monitoring damp with a Pi Zero W

Monitoring temperature and humidity in hard to reach places with a battery powered Pi

A couple of weeks ago I became a homeowner after years of renting flats. My new house is actually an old house built in the 30s. Like all old buildings there’s the possibility of damp during the winter months, particularly in places with poor ventilation like cupboards. The thing with cupboards is they don’t usually have power sockets, so plugging in a sensor isn’t an option without running extension cables all over the house. Luckily I have a spare Raspberry Pi Zero W, a DHT22 sensor, and a battery pack.

I want to log the temperature and humidity over time so I can review the trends for conditions where damp may become a problem. For this I’ll use a DHT22 sensor connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero W. I’ll store the data on the Pi and run a simple web server that allows me to view the data trends. Since I’ll be moving the Pi around to monitor several places it would be useful to group the data. This allows us to create the initial requirements:

The solution is very simple.

When we’ve decided we have enough data for the wardrobe and want to check under the sink, we can move the Pi and change the measurement name to kitchen-sink on the web server. Any new data will be saved to:

This method is simple and easy to understand when we come back to it in a few weeks or months. We can open the files with Notepad and the .csv file format format can be readily imported for analysis elsewhere.

In the stages of Manual, Manumatic, Automatic this is somewhere between Manual and Manumatic. We’re not reading the temperature and humidity off a dial and entering them into a spreadsheet (fully manual). However we’re also not linking the system to a dehumidifier to automatically reduce the humidity when it gets too high (fully automatic). Some next good steps would be to:

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