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Adding my home electricity uptime to status.href.cat

2025-08-2115:545236aggressivelyparaphrasing.me

status.href.cat now reports and notifies me if my home power/internet goes down! The other day, PG&E and my landlord emailed me about a power outage. The elevator system needed a technician to reset…

status.href.cat now reports and notifies me if my home power/internet goes down!

The other day, PG&E and my landlord emailed me about a power outage. The elevator system needed a technician to reset it. All the e-key readers in the lobby no longer work. This got me wondering, how long was the power out for? With this, I decided to add uptime stats for my home electricity.

PG&E emailed about the power outage. 10 minutes later, my power was restored. My landlord emailed, reporting all the things that they checked and are failing

My first thought was, how can I check if my home power is out? I have some IoT devices around the house connected to the Wi-Fi. If the power goes out, these devices would go offline, right? Unfortunately, it was a big waste of time; the “last connected” timestamps from the Wyze API are from almost 20 hours ago. I guess Wyze devices are incredibly passive, which doesn’t solve my problem.


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Comments

  • By fanatic2pope 2025-08-2117:322 reply

    I have a home server that is on 24x7 protected by a UPS. The UPS monitoring daemon (nut) provides a hook for calling a script when its status changes, so I have it push a high priority notification to my phone via ntfy whenever it goes on battery or off battery. I also have it broadcast on mqtt so that in the future I can have a dedicated daemon that will collect stats and take other actions that aren't really appropriate for a hook script.

    • By sugarpimpdorsey 2025-08-2117:382 reply

      How hilariously complicated.

      Make UPS data available over SNMP, track via MRTG. A simple, decidedly 1990s solution that unsurprisingly still works. Pretty graphs and everything.

      • By fanatic2pope 2025-08-2117:391 reply

        Complicated? It's a 10 line shell script and a single configuration item in the nut config.

        • By sugarpimpdorsey 2025-08-2117:412 reply

          > I also have it broadcast on mqtt so that in the future I can have a dedicated daemon that will collect stat

          mqtt? How many Docker containers do you have running to track UPS voltage?

          I keep forgetting SNMP is not "web scale" and only for greybeards on a minimum of 3+ prescription medications.

          • By ghotli 2025-08-2122:21

            The way you wrote this and your previous comment above led me to believe your account is new. I checked it, 74 days at time of writing. I get the impression you haven't read the guidelines here. I like this place as it is generally civil discourse and have no qualms being the person that points you to the "In Comments" section of the guidelines.

            https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

            Be kind, rewind.

          • By fanatic2pope 2025-08-2117:454 reply

            LOL, docker for running mosquitto at home? Who does that?

            • By NortySpock 2025-08-2120:29

              I did.

              It was convenient. The official docker image includes all the tools you need.

              Overkill? Sure. It sips memory and compute, but when most everything else is in docker, what is wrong with one more container.

              I did a write-up here:

              https://github.com/NortySpock/selfhosted-show-wiki/blob/bca6...

              (Eventually I did switch over to NATS emulating an MQTT endpoint so I could get a broker with Prometheus-scrapeable `/metrics` endpoint )

            • By Xevion 2025-08-2118:04

              Are you recommending that I run mosquitto directly on my Unraid server rather than Docker?

              Just to re-iterate, Unraid is a proprietary Linux OS based on Slackware Linux. It is generally ill-advised to ever run tooling directly on Unraid when a Dockerized equivalent is available.

            • By Nextgrid 2025-08-2121:55

              Docker is effectively just a packaging format on Linux - it's not a VM (unlike on Windows/Mac where running Docker involves running a hidden Linux VM on which containers are scheduled). So I don't see why you wouldn't use it if it makes things easier (like not having to worry about distro specifics, since there is generally one canonical Docker image for major pieces of software)?

      • By rhcom2 2025-08-2118:51

        What a use of electricity. I just go out to my power meter with a pencil and pad and note the number.

    • By fusionadvocate 2025-08-2117:342 reply

      How does ntfy compares to Pushover?

      • By binwiederhier 2025-08-2121:341 reply

        Disclaimer: I am the ntfy maintainer. Pleasantly surprised to be mentioned, hehe.

        Pushover is an amazing tool and works well. In my obviously biased opinion though, I think that ntfy has a ton more features than Pushover and is fully open source. You can self host all aspects of it or you can use the hosted version on ntfy.sh for free, without signups, or pay for higher limits.

        I suggest you try out ntfy;-)

        • By joezydeco 2025-08-2121:391 reply

          I use ntfy for a whole bunch of personal projects. THANK YOU for keeping this service up and running.

          • By binwiederhier 2025-08-2123:101 reply

            I love hearing that. Anything worth sharing? I love hearing how people use it. My favorite one is the guy protecting his apple tree from thieves by adding a camera and motion sensor and then sending himself a notification with the picture to catch the apple thief.

            • By joezydeco 2025-08-221:22

              I have a few things. One is home security, I get basic notifications when something is in the driveway. I'm working on getting Frigate running to hopefully give me the names or license plates of people when they arrive.

              I also have one tied to a manufacturing database at my company. When a batch of products rolls off the line I get an updated count of units made. Kind of a way to know production systems are running and there are no problems at the work cells.

              I also made a rickety-ass system that scrapes the local commuter rail API and fires off a notification when one of my trains is late or cancelled. That's been pretty helpful. The rail company has a Twitter account, but I don't go there anymore. So I rolled my own.

              ntfy makes this all incredibly easy. I love it.

      • By fanatic2pope 2025-08-2117:38

        I don't know, I've never used pushover. A quick look at their home page doesn't seem to indicate the option of self hosting on a VPS, so that precludes it for me. Otherwise from the code samples provided, it looks quite similar.

  • By toomuchtodo 2025-08-2116:11

    Very cool project! Another method you can run entirely remotely, if your utility supports it, is poll the utility's customer API endpoint for data where they expose if your power is out using your smart meter. ComEd in Illinois supports this, for example.

  • By ge96 2025-08-2117:42

    I have a self-updating github readme, reads a sensor at my home

    I joke if it goes down means something happened to me but sometimes the server has a problem like running out of space since an error logger keeps writing over and over

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