When we bought a freezer for our garage, I wanted a way to monitor the temperature. I got an Ecowitt GW1100 WiFi remote thermometer, placed it on top of the freezer, and let the probe dangle into the freezer itself. I integrated it into my Home Assistant world, programmed it to display the freezer temperature on my home monitor, and to send me a notification when the temp got above 15°F. I was paranoid about potentially losing hundreds of dollars of frozen food should something go wrong with the freezer or its power source.
Things worked great, and I got a test of it whenever we opened the freezer. I also used the GW1100 as a base station for the probe that monitors the temperature of the hot tub — that, too, has been handy — and we used it to monitor the temperature of our chick incubator while the chickens were still small. The range is fantastic: the hot tub, incubator, and freezer are hundreds of feet apart.
There was a problem or two, though. The probe hanging down was a minor hassle when opening the upper drawers of the freezer. It would sometimes get displaced to the outside when loading/unloading the freezer, and make it appear that the freezer had failed. Also, in spite of it being just a tiny little wire, it made enough of a gap between the door gasket and the freezer wall that a our very humid air entered and caused a lot of frost and ice to build up in the interior. (I am frequently impressed anew at the effects of the humidity here in our mist forest.)
After doing some reading, I decided to try to make a small slit in the door gasket with a razor blade and force the probe through. The gasket seemed to do a good job closing up around the probe wire, and next time I have an open tube of silicone cement I can seal it up.
So far, it seems to be working well.
NB: some freezers have heating elements embedded in the gasket. If you try this at home, make sure you don’t cut an active electrical part!
—2p