Fire Prevention Through Chimney Sentinel

The Chimney Sentinel project was created for preventing fire caused by wood-burning appliances by containing a probe that can be inserted into the chimney.

During the operation, a chimney fire can be detected by employing a remote FLASH microcontroller based monitoring unit. This tool will keep on monitoring, detecting, and sounding an alarm and if conditions persist, the chimney will be filled with excessive build-up of creosote. They are produced in environments when temperatures in the flue are too low. If the temperature does not move through the danger zone in a certain period, the Chimney Sentinel will continue to sound an alarm. One interesting feature is that the alarm condition will continue to be indicated and sound unstoppable even though the chimney fire has been detected and the sensor has been destroyed by the fire.

The circuit is built around an 8-bit PIC16F628 microcontroller with flash memory. It has low operating frequency of 4MHz along with a cheap ceramic resonator with built-in capacitors. The integrity of the data stored in the internal EEPROM is being protected by the Microchip MCP809 which provides a reliable reset. A Microchip TC1047 provides the cold-junction compensation.