Monitor Electric Motors Running or Not

[Hursh]

I'm wondering if anyone has tried using the Accelerometer based Wireless Tag Pro to monitor whether an electric motor is running or not. I would like to be able to log when different motors around my house start and stop running, mainly the fan and compressor motor in my HAVAC system and my swimming pool pump motor. I'm sure they would work to tell me when the motor started but I'm not sure if they would tell me when it stopped. Another concern I have is that setting the sensitivity enough to detect the motor running may cause the accelerometer to constantly be reporting and thus cause a lot of drain on the tag's battery. It would take some firmware probably, but something that would be nice is for the tag's accelerometer to report vibration levels something like the temperature element of the tag, where you could specify an auto update interval and be able to plot the vibration level, like temperature, which would allow you to see exactly when the motor was running or not running, and how smoothly it was running. Additionally, with the tag attached to the side of the motor you could probably fairly well monitor the temperature of the motor case and set temperature limits to let you know if the motor was running too hot or not.

If anyone has any experience using these tags in such an application I would be very interested since I think this would be a very good way to get motor run time and motor health data.

[EventPhotoMan]

I use WeMo Insight for monitoring my furnace.

I can see exactly when the device is on/off

All WeMo generate cv spreadsheet for you with lots of data

I Alison us the WeMo insure to tell me when my sump pump is on/off

With ifttt.com you can get instant notification when it turned on/off.