We go on vacation and on many occasions we may have doubts about how to protect the house and among eventualities, if the power has gone out at home. We have systems to know this, such as having a plug connected that allows us to remotely determine whether or not it has a power supply at a given time. But This little trick is even more practical.
It is not necessary to buy any device that notifies us by email or subscribe to any service that alerts us. In a very similar way to the one we use to monitor the house for little money, we can receive an alert on our mobile phone via WhatsApp when we have the electricity supply at home just by using a charger and our mobile phone.
A notice via WhatsApp in real time
Thanks to the colleagues of Xataka Androidwe have tested a system that allows us to send an alert in case a power outage has occurred at our home. An alert that can also arrive via SMS or WhatsApp. For the process I chose to use WhatsApp, for convenience.
To create this system I have used a Android mobile phone I had at home, a charger and the free MacroDroid app which can be downloaded from this link in Google Play Store. To all this and as a security measure, since I don’t like leaving a phone on day and night, I added a connected plug that I already had at home.
The process is very simple. First of all, we download the Droid macro application on our phone, which we will have connected to the charger. Now it is about creating a new Macro for which we click on “Add Macro”.
A new screen then opens with three options: “Triggers”, “Actions” and “Restrictions”. We are only going to use the first two.
on triggers click on the “+” that appears at the top right and within all the options we choose “Battery/Power” and within this “Charger Connected/Disconnected”. Then we choose “Charger disconnected”. We already have the first step.
In “Actions” We click on the symbol again “+” the new screen with the title “Add action” we must choose “Messenger service”. Within this section we mark “Send WhatsApp”.
In this section we must write the phone number to which we want to send the WhatsApp and the message that we want to appear on the screen. I have set “The power has gone out at home.”
On paper, everything would already be there. Thus, in which the application detects that the charger is not sending current, in this case, why the power supply has been cut off, It will send a notification to the mobile phone that we have dialed.
It can be useful Any Android phone you have at home that you don’t use. For the system to work, the phone must be connected to the charger and connected to the phone’s data (Wi-Fi does not work, since if the power has gone out it is normal for the router not to work) and with the WhatsApp installed.
But this system and as an extra measure, I added a connected plug. This plug is the one that acts as a bridge between the power outlet and the mobile charger, so that at a certain time I can turn it off if I notice any strange behavior in the electrical connection so that the mobile phone is not constantly charging.
This last point is not necessary, but if you are going to leave a phone connected day and night, it may be interesting to have a plug of this type that allows you to establish time schedules (if I already know that I will receive a false alarm, but it is controlled) or disconnect the power if we consider it necessary.