HASS saving my meat

That one day my fridge decided to give up but blasting me with hot air right when I wanted to put food in there. Thermostat failed in a really funny way. It refused to turn the cooler on, but decided to get hot itself. I spent half a day trying to find a replacement part, for such a simple thing as GE thermostat I found no help. I couldn’t ID it, repair shops or ebay were to no help.

It’s summer and I had a few bags of food to pack, we decided to look for another fridge, but hit another brick wall. Current fridge is integrated in and has very specific dimension, it’s wider than higher and it has 9cm legs to match cupboards. We found a few models that would fit, so we decided to order them… and the earliest delivery can be in 5 days. I decided to hack that fridge, remove thermostat, connect wires together and make the 20 years old fridge join the IoT club.

Safety first, so I packed the bluetooth thermostat in plastic bag with SILICA GEL, removed thermostat, and hardwired cooler:

Yes, at first temperature in the fridge was 26°C.

I plugged the fridge to a TP-Link HS110 - that’s a WiFi controller power switch.

It was time to configure HASS. Turned out, it all was super simple. HASS offers web interface to create conditional or time based automations.

I needed two automations, one for turning fridge on and another one to turn it off. Turn on when temperature inside is above 10°C, and turn off when it’s below 5°C.

That’s it, it was time to observe, with a few clicks I generated a dashboard showing temperature changes in the fridge and power consumption of the switch.