Hello, and welcome to my Instructable for building a cheap, simple, somewhat useful power outage monitor! If you're here, it's probably because, like me, you live in an area that experiences occasional power outages. Congratulations? At any rate, you've probably also done some searching for an IoT type product that works well enough and doesn't cost a lot of money...and no doubt you've been disappointed. Most of the monitors available are either dumb-devices (rely on physical presence and simply sound an alarm) or rely on a landline phone connection (remember those?) to call a pre-specified number. None of those are what I was looking for, which was just a simple device that could sense when it lost power, and send an alert to my phone.

What you're going to build here is not perfect; it relies on some indirect monitoring (basically, it detects that it was disconnected from an Internet connection and sends a message when it's back online). My long-term plan is to hopefully build something with a backup battery system, that works in tangent with a UPS (for the modem/router) and some intelligence to understand when it kicks over to battery. If you're interested in something like that, visit http://powersdown.launchrock.com and let me know; it might encourage me to put some effort into it.

Anyway...with back-story and caveats out of the way... on with the show...