One of the most common sensors is Dallas DS18B20 temperature sensor. It is pretty cheap, accurate, has only one data wire and is available in water-proof package. mqopen has already support for DS18B20, so building simple temperature sensor is really easy.

It comes handy at the start of the summer for monitoring water temperature in a swimming pool. I built a probe very similar to this one, except with water-resistant cable join.

Sensor itself is placed at the bottom of the swimming pool where the water temperature is lowest. Other end of the probe is plugged in ESP8266 node under little roof, protected against rain.

Sensor periodically reads water temperature and sends it to my MQTT network. mqspeak then collect the data and updates ThingSpeak channel with actual water temperature. Final graph (from rainy day) looks like this: