Environmental Network Monitoring (Score 1)

I would suggest using something like a single board computer (or embedded ethernet module, ...) with some analog & digital I/O connected to several sensors. On the temperature side, you can use something like the TMP36FSZ ($1.40 each from digikey) to monitor temperature. They will work down to -55 degrees C, so you can actually wrap / glue / ... to some of the pipes you would expect to freeze to monitor those directly. As far as monitoring for water leaks, you can use one of the digital i/o ports on the card, and just connect two wires to it and strip the ends. Leave the stripped ends sitting on the floor, and if water gets to the leads, it will short them out (thus setting off the digital input) and you know there is water there. If you want to get fancy, you can even script things like turning on and off the water with a solenoid valve, turn on and off the heater for short times, ... Your imagination is the limiting factor. A cheap module that is also really easy to program is the rabbitcore modules. They already come with the full TCP/IP stack, web servers, SMTP, etc. If you really want to get fancy, you can use SNMP and have something like Nagios monitor the sensors, and alert on a specific problem. I actually have several of these set up in my server rooms to monitor temp / humidity / air flow using SNMP and Nagios and they work great. I have pictures of the rabbitcores, temp sensors, humidity sensors, etc. If you want to discuss further contact me. Good luck on the new job.