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Monitoring my 'dumb' boiler with AI

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I have this boiler at a rental property I own. It has 3 smart thermostats (Ecobee). They're great and give the individual tenants zone control, but they only notify me something is wrong when it's already too late as they rely on observing the 'call for heat' and a ongoing decline in room temperature to trigger the alert.The boiler is pretty smart, it has all kinds of cool error codes, but the issue is I have no way of knowing theres an error flashing on the screen. That is, until now.I put a Tapo camera pointed at the boiler (getting Tapo to export still frames was a whole other issue, code for doing that is in the same github project for anyone interested) and use AI to read the screen and zone controller lights.The result is a system that sends me a text message any time something goes outside of the normal operating parameters. My goal is to deliver a great experience for the tenants living at this property, and now I'm able to connect my 'dumb' appliances to the internet without any of the typical risks associated with exposing critical infrastructure to the web.

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HN · launched Oct 16, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 89%)

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Could you build this?

Partial The dashboard, alerting, and analysis software is vibe-codeable, but the core value depends on physical boiler sensing hardware and safe installation, which software alone cannot provide.

What it would actually take: A real version needs cheap sensors (current clamps, temperature, pressure, flow or flue sensors) on a microcontroller such as an ESP32, a telemetry pipeline into a time-series store, and anomaly rules or a model tuned to the specific boiler. The hard part is reliable hardware installation and safety around gas and heating equipment, which calls for a technician or electrician. Vibe coding can handle the dashboard and alerting, but not the sensing and safety engineering.

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Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 58 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #59 of 59 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 285 days after the earliest competitor.

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