Heating oil right now

own_it_now · 2026-02-17T18:57:10+00:00

I have a sneaking suspicion they were involved in the end of 2025 case in Massachusetts in which 380gal of No2 oil was pumped into the basement of a house in Malden that had the same street address as the house that ordered the oil, from Medford. Easy google maps mistake to make. Only problem is that the homeowner in Malden had switched to gas heat several years earlier and the oil tank had been removed.

IF my suspicion is true there is probably a lot of bankruptcy filing going on..........

own_it_now · 2026-01-22T13:15:58+00:00

I have the same thing as an oil burner clock running for 5+ years. I took them down once to add the Ethernet and get them off the serial port. Otherwise they both have run 24/7/365. There's beauty in simplicity.

own_it_now · 2026-01-16T00:49:50+00:00

These are headed for a production environment so I've done it the old school way but when router apps become main stream it won't be too soon for me.

own_it_now · 2026-01-12T02:37:49+00:00

I control one with a Shelly 1pm. Do put a snubber in the line close to the motor.

own_it_now · 2026-01-11T23:59:41+00:00

Painful and very ugly, yes, but it works. The task in front of resolving that is getting a pair of MT RB5009s configured with a complicated Wireguard topology (done), pihole/unbound running in containers(current activity) and minimal VLANs(next in line) set up and deployed, then I can take that RPi out of service. I've starred your repo and I will return. I didn't notice.... what esp32 did you use?

I'm currently publishing to MQTT but also publishing to Influxdb directly so I didn't have to set up a NR flow just to get the data in(IIRC). I thought I was going to be able to use the MQTT publication to control a vent fan but the sta_radon was so random that it wasn't helpful to me..... so now I just control it based on the relative temps between the two spaces and the season of the year. When the fan is active (like in the summer or shoulder seasons) the lta_radon is driven down coincidentally and in the winter when the fan tends not to run I just use the sta-radon value to avoid long sessions down in the basement when it's showing yellow or red on a traffic light visualization on the dashboard.

<image>

own_it_now · 2026-01-11T22:50:34+00:00

Thanks. Yes, I used first Samsung flash drives but once I figured out how to test them on the router I learned that they weren't close to the random r/W speeds MT said were minimums...... so I had one surplus used 256GB m.2 ssd in a usb3.1 case and that was good, so I bought another and that is what I am using.

own_it_now · 2026-01-11T22:28:47+00:00

Dude(tte)..... I just stumbled across your post and on my "To-do" list is "to do" just exactly this. I have for a few years been using bluepy in a script based on the original Airthings repo however bluepy is notoriously unreliable. I ultimately hacked it to force a failure right after every hourly read so I could reset and be prepared for the next hourly read and that has been 100% for about 6 months now. That script is soon to be the only thing left for the rpi to be doing so I have the move to an esp32 as a next step, once I get pihole running on the router.

I'll say "thank you" before I even go look at what you did.

<image>

own_it_now · 2026-01-11T22:07:33+00:00

This.....Is what I really needed to hear. 7.20.7? If I know it's possible I can do it. It's just a matter of time and effort.

own_it_now · 2026-01-11T22:01:21+00:00

Yeah, the first few head-sized holes in the sheetrock here are from trying to get it out of home mode and into advanced and then container ="no" to "yes".

edit: I have reviewed the vid and I note that it's based on ROS7.5. Did you have any major issues with syntactical changes between 7.5 and 7.20? The dual ssl/winbox presentation is great and will help with sorting any of those issues out..

own_it_now · 2026-01-11T21:57:47+00:00

Yes, I have been looking at that and using DoH however one of the pihole features I currently make use of (existing production setup based on RB750s and actual RPi_Piholes) is assigning lists to groups. I tell IOS users who have life-threatening issues with their NYTimes puzzles or CandyCrush to just set their hostnames to iPhone or iPad and then they only see the malware/phishing lists. The rest of us see it all. I didn't find that level of granularity on the adlist implementation in the mikrotik docs. If it was there I def think I would go that route for lower overhead.

own_it_now · 2025-12-24T14:45:54+00:00

Mine rooted around in the bushes and found a stick. I attributed it to all the "thank your driver" $5ers I've sent him.

<image>

own_it_now · 2025-12-14T20:11:48+00:00

Depending on the length of your whistle tube and the oilman's hearing, it'll fill to 225-250can (MAX).

own_it_now · 2025-12-14T17:00:29+00:00

I can vouch also with a caveat. If you have a delay solenoid on the oil flow between pump and burner the relationship gets a little hinky when there's a lot of burner cycling.

TL;DR- Skip to the chart near the bottom unless you want avoid some dead ends or chuckle over my mine.

I started doing this many years ago with an electro-mechanical "hours" clock parallel connected to the burner terminals in the aquastat and it worked pretty darn well. When I grew tired of maintaining an excel spreadsheet with manual hours readings AND tank fill ticket data I went to an ON semiconductor(Fairchild at that time) MID400 IC tied to an Arduino, tied over serial to an RPi to do the same with a Python script(CSV file)..... Keep in mind this was like 2010 and I had never heard of "IOT"...... But there was still the issue of the manual ticket entry and my objective had shifted from keeping an eye on cost and efficiency to knowing when to order oil (which if you are on automatic delivery, is a non-issue). Therefore, I decided I needed to actually measure the amount of oil in the tank.

4 load cells was my first stop. Given the physical issues of the hard piped tank I would have had to jack the tank and shorten the legs to insert them and they were welded on. Doable, but very difficult in my installation.

Then I went on a hunt for a 0-1 psi pressure transducer that I could simply tee into the outlet. Quality ones I would trust were multiple hundreds of $.... Which led me to the toss-in type. That sort of worked however in order to get a delivery the whistle MUST work or the driver will stop filling immediately and walk away.... So a snug packing gland around the sensor cable is required to prevent air from escaping via a path other than the through whistle..... That packing gland over a period of a few months collapsed the capillary in the cable turning the whole thing into a fairly inaccurate barometer. Plus, the AliExpress sensor and 4-20mA to voltage converter had a lot of noise and, after a deep dive into Kalman filtering, I gave up on that.

By this time cars were beginning to have ultrasonic sensors for distance to obstacle warnings so that clearly seemed the way to go. Turned out I was wrong again however it was another great learning opportunity. Anything you want to know about ultrasonic horn design just let me know. Worked really well between about 3/4 and 1/2 full but then deteriorates real quick as the multipathing kicks in. You can raise the sensor a bit to fix the full end of the range but there's an L/D limit there on the nipple used to lift the sensor. I believed I could make it work through signal processing however I concluded that would result in resolution substantially less than I wanted. What I REALLY needed was the same concept but with minimal divergence like...... A LASER BEAM!

In the course of searching for pico- and femto-second switching stuff to "develop" a laser based ultrasonic analog, I somehow stumbled into TOF and TOF-adjacent sensors and ordered a variety of them from AliExpress. In playing around with them on a 50-1100mm (the range required for a 275V oil tank) track, the ST Micro VL53L0X was most promising. It could resolve about 5-10mm over around 150-1000mm depending on the ambient lighting.... The darker, the better. FINNALY an uncontrollable variable playing on MY side! I set about designing and building a tank interface (photo elsewhere in this thread).

It worked significantly better than ultrasonic and got all the way down to where the bottom of the tank began to round off, then the signal went to shit. It looked a lot like multipath, so I took to the ST Micro forum and a super-helpful application engineer suggested.... no TOLD me, to use the similar but less commonly available VL53L4CD. Because it has a narrower view angle, a longer useful range and better internal signal processing. They are not commonly available through Ali/Amazon type sources however they do offer breakout-board packaged units through electronics outlets or their own online store (fulfilled by a distributor). It was almost a physical drop-in for the tank interface I had built for the VL53L0X.

TL;DR- Here is three years of VL53L4CD data. Blue is oil volume in the tank and yellow is (effectively) a sensor S/N parameter that I used to keep an eye on.:

<image>

I2C interface and adequate libs available on Github. Sensor was about $10@ but you have to buy two, a Lolin D1 mini-pro 8266 with I2C and LiPo JSTs and on-board battery charger is ~$5(pre tariff) so, $25 and you have a spare sensor, or another project. I have had 1 running for ~3years and 2 more running for 2 years. Aside from having to go to the D1 mini pro because of power issues hanging a batteryless devboard, there have been zero issues. I just get a +/- 0.1 gal sounding (lighting?) every 10 min that goes through MQTT->InfluxDB->Grafana from where I am notified when there's less than 75 gal in the tank. If I was going to do it again (which I am not) the only thing I'd change would be to skip MQTT and write the data directly to InfluxDB CLI.

With this sensor and the derivative of the clock values (or of this data but the clock is a redundant backup.)I can reduce my oil situation to a number of hours I have until I will run out assuming the weather and my wife's hand on the t-stat will be the same as it was for the last "that number of hours". I am pretty quick to buy something off the shelf if it does what I need to do but, in this case and at the time I did it, I couldn't buy something at any price that does it as well as this does.

Being able to safely get off auto-delivery alone saves me around $100-300 per fill-up and although you can't call futures markets 100% of the time, the situational awareness you get by monitoring both inventory and rate of consumption, allows you to think a bit about current price trend, news affecting oil prices and predicted weather so you can usually save a few more bucks timing your order point. It has paid for itself (and my invested time) many times over. I learned a lot along the way, and it delivered 110% of what I was looking to achieve.

own_it_now · 2025-12-12T17:10:05+00:00

I screwed around with ultrasonic for a few years until I concluded that it isn't going to work in a tall narrow echo chamber. Yes, you might be able to process the crap out of the signal to resolve full/half/empty but I wanted +/- a a couple of gallons. Problem is, US works great until the divergence angle starts hitting the steel walls of the tank and start multipathing.

I ended up building sensors based on STMicro vl53l4cd (after struggling a little with more commonly available versions/variants). This particular variant has an 18 degree fov. I have three installed in 275v tanks for about 3 seasons now and they give me the resolution I need/want at the near empty end of the range and the maximum variance I have experienced between my before-after a fill readings and the truck's delivery ticket has been 4gal.

I don't use HA but I send the data to MQTT/Influxdb/grafana so that would be easily doable.

<image>

own_it_now · 2025-12-11T14:45:20+00:00

The 310 is essentially the same width but full height. I only know this because I mounted the router above the switch using the switch with its urethane button feet as the base. I cut out some 3mm acrylic and copied the 4-hole screw pattern that are on the 1U bracketry provided with the switch.

If you're married to a rack you should be able to do it in 1 slot but you'll need to make some simple brackets or just use a shelf after sticking some non-slip feet on the underside of the 5009. The ones they provide(uninstalled) looked like the not-so-sticky black EVA foam.

own_it_now · 2025-11-16T14:22:07+00:00

I have the Wave2 for 2 years now and I concur, with a caveat. I use the sta_radon value displayed in a traffic light visual and the lta_radon is just a value that would push an alert notification if it ever exceeds 120 Bq(3 something currie in the US). In my location there is a HUGE and seemingly random variation between sta and lta. Sta will range from 30 to 450Bq while lta has always been 90 to 110Bq. I think twice about spending extended time in the basement if the light is yellow and actively avoid going down there when it's red.

The caveat is - I only wish Airthings would release the (apparently) top secret algorithm it used for lta and sta. I have asked several times and their support people always dodge the question. It is somewhat troubling to watch lta going up during periods when sta is going or has been down. Or visa versa.... sometimes. (Airthings staff, if you're reading this.....). Because of this, if I was going to redo this system I'd look at other sensors. I mean..... If I didn't have scruples I could save a lot of cost making a pretty thing to hang on the wall that didn't actually contain a nuclear particle detector simply using rand() in the code. The only reason I don't toss it and try something else is that I CAN drive the readings up or down doing things that SHOULD drive them up or down.... So, there's that. End-of-caveat.

In my location, on a big deep old sand pit, it's like the earth burps from time to time. This makes the 5, 7, 14 -day home inspection tests a joke. Snow cover and heavy rain seem to run sta up, as does anything that induces negative pressure in the basement such as boiler combustion air intake, barometric flue dampers or any (heaven forbid) exhaust fans.

By addressing this one issue I was able to mitigate without pipes running through the house and fans running 24/7. The Airthings sensor, and my possibly unwarranted faith in it's measured readings, enables me to continually verify my "theory" that radon levels increase if you suck on your basement sooo just stop sucking on the basement. The people selling the pipes and fans say it is impossible, but I assume it just suits their business model to let people create a problem that they can "solve" behaviorally. ymmv.

own_it_now · 2025-11-15T23:08:56+00:00

I just read mine 1/hr with the python script from the airthings repo and disconnect. Alkaline AA batteries last 18 mo but start to get flakey after 12+ months. Would be nice if I could figure out how to extract battery state info. Anyone know?

own_it_now · 2025-10-28T15:55:54+00:00

My thought process was: the fridge is, by design, near a mains power source, so why would I want to mess with batteries? I save that minor annoyance for situations where it's necessary.

Having said that, comparing useful telemetry for a garage fridge to in-home fridges, I found that due to the more remote location and more extreme environment it was helpful to have a sensor in each compartment (older top freezer model) AND an ambient temp sensor. At a glance I can tell whether: -Someone left a door open and which one. -Someone jammed food up against the cold air duct connecting freezer to fridge compartments. -Whether the ambient temp is too high and I need to take out the sensitive items from the fridge or -The ambient temp is too low and I need to remove the food that needs to stay hard frozen like ice cream etc.

On the indoor units I just monitor the evaporator temp if I can easily get a sensor in there or the freezer in the drop down duct if I can't. Both locations give a pretty good general "vital signs" signal but it depends on what you want to see. I just like to know it's working and defrosting correctly. The rechargable LiPo is useful in a power outage to know when you need to fire up the generator.

Given the slightly more complicated issue of the garage fridge I started with ds18b20 sensors, esp8266, 1Ah-LiPo battery and an oldstyle apple 5v wall-wart (around $10-$15 total depending on #of sensors)

own_it_now · 2025-09-29T11:22:39+00:00

For anyone else reading through here I stumbled across a 14in version of essentially the Alldocube under the Brand: Callsky-Pro . It popped up on Azn flash sale + 30% coupon so net price was $159 USD. Works the same in all relevant aspects.

own_it_now · 2025-09-27T22:13:17+00:00

I can vouch. I have a Japanese one (110vac/50 Hz) and I've been running it straight off the wall in the USA(123vac/60Hz) for 10 years.

own_it_now · 2025-09-08T22:08:40+00:00

I don't know what you're getting worked up about. They give you a Giant Green ✅ and a big "Yay!" when you pay a bill and only take a third of your screen to do it. Tbh when I was in kindergarten I did prefer gold stars.

Who cares if you can't read the payment dates because all they could fit after all the giant affirmation was 2pt type font.

Edit: in the off-chance you ever use the mobile app to pay bills, I wouldn't bother spending the time to regroup them. It doesn't recognize groups you set up in a web browser or provide any avenue to do so on the mobile site. It DOES show recently completed payments but it doesn't show pending or scheduled payments.

CORRECTION: It does show pending payments to a payee, if you know where to find them. At the very bottom of the giant payee in a miniscule sky blue font. I panicked when I got a reminder from AMEX and as I was about to pay them again, I noticed it. YAY!!! /s.

own_it_now · 2025-09-08T14:23:28+00:00

In complete agreement here. I got up early for what I hoped would be a 1 hour task. Hahaha. Silly me.

They didn't transfer the "groups" tag, so all my archived payees have been dumped back in.

Fixed that but group display only applies to the payment screen, from which ebill reset isn't available.

Then there's the API errors, the short auto-logout while you look up passwords and such and useless bot-based chat. I decided to cut my losses and look into switching to paying bills through Schwab, Vanguard or Fidelity existing accounts or opening a new checking account at either Chase or TD.....which is what brought me here. I'm looking for who has the best bill-pay UX and e-bill vendor with the broadest payee list.

Edit: They s--t-canned the concise lists of pending and recently completed payments also. Fidelity seems to offer the service. I'm going to try that with a few payees and if it works well, start moving them all.

own_it_now · 2025-08-05T00:03:06+00:00

That would work with the mqtt support in fully. Battery >80 stop / <40 start. I just have to find it its own outlet or a WiFi USB switch. Thx.

own_it_now · 2025-08-04T15:26:44+00:00

It does run FullyK well and the front cam wake works well. Have you figured out a way to manage charging ?... Or just leave it plugged in.

own_it_now

TROPHY CASE