Last year we bought an uninsulated t-hangar that came equipped with a Dayton natural gas radiant tube heater. The heater was controlled by a manual thermostat that would go down to about 40* F. It's too expensive and inefficient to leave the heater on all the time through the winter, so I began to search for solutions to be able to remotely control the heater.

With all of the new home automation stuff available now there are lots of options, if you have an internet connection. There are some neat long range (miles) wireless bridge products (google Ubiquiti NanoBeam) to extend a wifi network, but they generally need line of sight and I'm not wild about mounting an antenna on the roof of the hangar.

Then I stumbled onto an LTE mobile hotspot called the Karma Go. It uses the Sprint cell data network, and creates it's own wifi network. They have different data plans, but I'm using the least expensive which is $10/mo for 1 GB of data. On top of that I'm paying an additional $5/mo for what they call premium services, which allows me to create a custom SSID and password so the wifi thermostat (or any type of headless device) can connect. So, $15/mo for 1 GB of data, month to month with no contracts. My only reservation was whether or not it would get a good enough cell signal inside the metal hangar, but that has not been an issue so far.

The old mechanical thermostat was replaced with a Honeywell RTH6580WF wifi themostat, in conjunction with an Aube Technologies RC840T-120 relay transformer to control the heater and provide 24V AC to power the thermostat. It's been working great for a few days, now the only question is long term reliability. The Honeywell thermostat has a nice android/iOS app that makes it really easy to monitor the hangar temp and control the system from anywhere. Now I'll be able to leave the heater off most of the time. When I know I'm going to fly, I'll turn the heat on for a while (how long depends on ambient temps, but no more than a day prior seems to get the oil and TIT temps up to the indoor temp set point of 45* F) without having to make an extra trip to the airport.

If you have electric engine preheat you could add a wifi outlet to remotely control preheat. Really, once you have wifi in the hangar the options now are endless.

Very cool. Any issues with it staying on and connected 24x7 without fail? It could be a bit annoying if it decides to shut down periodically, or due to inactivity.

colopilot wrote:Very cool. Any issues with it staying on and connected 24x7 without fail? It could be a bit annoying if it decides to shut down periodically, or due to inactivity.

That's one of my concerns too, time will tell I guess. Going on a week since installation with no connection interruptions, hopefully that's a good sign!

The Karma Go has a cool data usage screen in the iOS app that lets you see usage by hour/day/month. So far the Honeywell thermostat is very consistently using 8 MB of data per day, evenly split between upload and download.

So for just the thermostat I only need 250 MB or so of data per month. Is anyone aware of a mobile hot spot plan (preferably with no contracts) with at least 250 MB of data for less than $15/month? So far I'm happy with the Karma Go, but if it doesn't work out for some reason it would be nice to know about other options.

Ted

I don't know of any that are less than what you're paying per month. There are a few that start at around $25/mo, but $15 is pretty cheap if it works reliably. It does seem that if you go over the 1GB it starts to get expensive in a hurry though, so it's worth keeping a close eye on it.

With all of the cloud enabled devices out there, this does look like a great way to remotely control or monitor your hangar. I'd also be skeptical about the coverage inside an enclosed metal shell, but if it's working then that's great! I was wondering about something like this for remotely controlling a wifi outlet and kicking on an electric pre-heater, or even putting in a little security camera that can alert if it detects motion. Lots of possibilities.

Who is your cell phone carrier? I think they all will have similar plans, but as an example ATT lets you add a device to your wireless plan for $10 per month and will share your data allowance between all the devices. They have wifi hotspot devices like this: https://www.att.com/devices/zte/velocity.html#sku=sku7420235 that are free with a contract.

For those in Alaska, GCI will let you add a device for $8 per month to your shared data plan and also has free wifi hotspots.

colopilot wrote:With all of the cloud enabled devices out there, this does look like a great way to remotely control or monitor your hangar. I'd also be skeptical about the coverage inside an enclosed metal shell, but if it's working then that's great! I was wondering about something like this for remotely controlling a wifi outlet and kicking on an electric pre-heater, or even putting in a little security camera that can alert if it detects motion. Lots of possibilities.

Preheat would be a perfect application for a wifi outlet. The home automation industry is exploding right now, so many things you can do. "Alexa, preheat my airplane..."

Prosaria wrote:Who is your cell phone carrier? I think they all will have similar plans, but as an example ATT lets you add a device to your wireless plan for $10 per month and will share your data allowance between all the devices.

That is definitely a good option. Unfortunately Verizon has very poor reception inside this hangar, so I can't take advantage of that.

I was told about another provider called FreedomPop that looks interesting. It looks like if you buy one of their wifi hot spot devices (prices start around $30) that their base plan gives you 500 MB per month free. I'm guessing 500 MB per month isn't enough for most users these days, so most would end up paying for more data, but for hangar monitoring it would be enough (unless a camera streaming to the cloud was involved). Has anyone used FreedomPop? Hard to beat free (if it works).