I run SmartThings and Konneced for my home automation. I decided I could get some data on my boiler and hot water usage by monitoring the pipe temperatures with some cheap DS18B20 probes off Amazon.

Parts:
DS18B20 Five for $11.99 on Amazon
20′ of Shielded Low Voltage Security Alarm Wire
6′ of Aluminum tape
1 Mini PCB Prototype Board
1 4K7 resistor
A few shrink tubings

I used a Konnected add on board, put and connected my security wire to it. I tied the yellow wire to Pin 6, the black to the adjacent ground and the red to the +5v via a dupont wire. Next I ran the security wire over to my indirect hot water heater, where I connected two DS18B20’s and another cable over to my boiler. I used a prototype board because it was not an easy place to solder and though, I guess I could have done the soldering on the bench and then run the wire, as I did with my second run. I added the 4K7 pull up resistor here. I couldn’t get on of the yellow wires to insert into the prototype board, so I pushed in a header.

On my workbench I soldered three DS18B20 to one security wire and shrink tubed each wire plus a shink tube over all three. Effectively I have a star design.

I placed the probes on the pipe an attached with aluminum tape. I then wrapped some insulation over the taped section.

I configured Konnected to poll every minute instead of every three. The devices appeared SmartThings shortly after I configured pin 6 to be a temperature probe.

My next task was to get the data recorded in my Raspberry Pi. For that I’m using InfluxDB and Grafana, following this guide: http://codersaur.com/2016/04/smartthings-data-visualisation-using-influxdb-and-grafana/