ESP8266 Community Forum

Thank you all for the suggestions. I did buy a couple of accelerometers about a year ago and never used them. I'll experiment with those.

I did think of simply trying to detect a voltage across the timer switch. This initially sounded simple and had the benefit that I wouldn't need a case as I could have hidden it all inside the machine but looking into it, I'd need an optoisolator that I don't already have and I realised that I'd have to have the ESP8266 outside the machine so it could pick up the wifi.

I'm hoping that I can demonstrate to my wife that all those boxes of electronic bits that she sees me playing with aren't entirely useless. Wish me luck.

hmm, usually topcovers of modern household appliances are not metall.
Most modern appliance electronics are not mains isolated, so if you allready tap the internal powersupply there is no use for an optoisolator, but take care of potential differences on signals.
Tapping the power supply and sensing the power to the heater relay may be a way forward...

BTW as any household appliance (besides bread toasters etc) have a microcontroller these days, I don't understand why they don't come with an ethernet connector anyway, and provide a SNMP service

because there would be no need for projects like this to spend our time on ...