If you've ever rented an apartment, maybe you've personally experienced this concept where the space is always almost perfect. Maybe it has all the things you were looking for, the free parking spot, in-unit laundry, high-ceiling, BUT.... it has oil heating.
What's oil heating?
Yup, that was me too. Having lived in homes with natural gas or just some radiator that would periodically turn on in my dorm during the winter, I wasn't really sure what oil heating meant.
Well, simply put - what it meant was that we had an oil tank in our basement which was responsible for ensuring that we could get hot water and heating in our home. Simple enough right?... You would think so, but turns out the process for getting oil involved calling in a local oil supplier who would drive a huge tanker and regularly fill in the tank in the basement. (I was also relieved when I learned this, for a moment when signing the lease, I thought I personally had to retrieve and fill oil in the basement haha) Alright.. now it seems simple enough right?
As all things go, it was unfortunately not that simple.
Problem 1:
I need to exit my actual apartment unit, walk around the outside of the house, down an unpaved dirt decline to get to the basement - home of the oil heater.
Problem 2:
The existing manual gauge on the oil tank is hard to read and it gave me little confidence in really understanding how fast I was actually using my oil.
Problem 3:
I am lazy, and I was not interested in walking down to the basement every time to check the tank. Plus, there was no way for me to even predict / know when I would need to actually fill up the tank.
The Solution
Engineer a remote solution that allows me to remotely monitor the oil level!
System Overview
