MSI Services Blog

In Byram Township where our office (and my home) is located, we have terribly “hard water”.  Heat that water up constantly in a hot water heater and you’ve got a recipe for rusty hot water heaters that rot out faster than imaginable.  So… today some of the guys were working in the classroom and discovered that a small hot water heater used for hot water in the kitchen and bathrooms decided today was the day – to leak on the floor and keep me from getting much of anything useful done.  Well, most of the damage is behind us, some multiple hundreds of dollars in new hot water tank and expert installation included.  (Thank you, Polite Plumber).  And the dehumidifier is cranking to get the remaining water out of the carpet.  Oh the joys of property management.  Anyway, this is the push over the ledge I needed to come up with a (hopefully) cost effective environmental monitoring system.  No, this isn’t some United Nations nonsense about how much vegetation-feeding carbon dioxide is going into the atmosphere, it is about keeping an eye out for leaky appliances and some useful (and fun?) technology at the same time.  This is going to start out as a hypothetical design idea and a mobile software application to monitor it.  Why mobile?  Well, a couple of reasons.  Mobile is more interesting in some ways and I want to extend it to have some more features over time.  Could it all be browser based? yes, and we might start that way, however the problem with browser based applications is that you have to think to go there and click and clack.  I prefer an application which is periodically checking on things for me.  So now, off to write an article about how this thing is going to work….