I am looking for a decent method to log temperature and humidity data in various place of my house. I am talking at 12 or more sensors across 3 floors.
Ideally the solution is using some (rechargeable) batteries like AAA and small enough to discreetly fit in any room. A screen would be a nice to have, but I’m totally fine without it. At the end it doesn’t really matter if these are talking over Wifi, BLE, zigbee, z-wave or even 433, I just need to be able to get each sensor data reading in OH without leaking data to the cloud or having to use an App. (using an app for the initial config is fine) I even consider to get whatever is the appropriate gateway or dongle for it, as long as I know it will work for sure. The reason of my post today is to ask the community what is actually working ? and what does work pretty much out of the box without soldering, flashing or too much DIY (not that i dislike DIY, just no time at the moment to dig deep into that or build something x12). I need something that just works. Ideally with MQTT.
I know there are cheap devices from China but does anyone here had a long enough experience with these to report that they are a good deal or not ? I had a quick looks at Xaomi Aqara and LYWSD03MMC Mija, Sonoff, Shelly, MoesHouse, Sensorpush, and more. ESP8266 + DHT22/SHT30 is nice but i need to solve battery and case problem. Price and accuracy do of course matter, but at the end a 5$ vs a 15$ sensor both are cheap ! Same for accuracy I am looking to log room env. changes over a long period so if the device is off by a few percent it doesn’t really matter. What is really important is the build quality in the long run, a stable transmission and not to have to ship all my data to some random absurd places on the Internet…
what combination of sensors, OH binding, GW/hardware are YOU using?
for what price?
do you regret your choice ?
I have a couple of dht22/d1mini (esp8266) devices for two rooms…These are my important sensors for controlling the heating.
But for all the other rooms I have the xiaomi humidity and temperature sensor. I do have their aqara gateway, but have migrated all the temp sensors off and on to zigbee2mqtt and CC2531 coordinator and routers. Might be an option for you.
I have several Z-Wave sensors from Zooz that report humidity, luminance, temp, and motion. I also use NodeMCUs with various sensors and MQTT. These are are my preferred sensors because they cost almost nothing, and I can setup whatever hardware I want with them and write the code myself. I originally set them up with 18650s, but they are so small that I just plug them into a 5v USB power adapter and leave them at the outlet.
As you are looking for cheap sensors and mqtt integration, this is what I am using here.
I use the Xiaomi/Aqara Temp/Humidity/Pressure-Sensor and Zigbee2mqtt.
The sensors are very small and the battery lasts for more than one year (at least for me)
Thanks for the suggestion, I doubt that cheap Xiaomi stuff are very reliable and accurate but for that price i might get a few extra just in case. I also checked and it seems that flashing can be done quickly and OTA. The issue is that this requires to build a OpenMQTTGateway or multiple ones to cover 300m2 house over 3 floors. I will look deeper into this
I began by building my own sensors indoor and outdoor, I learned a lot, but it took me so much time…
Now I have less time, I want things that work, that looks nice, and there is more device offering than 4 years ago.
So I don’t mess up any more building sensors for my home
I’ve three DIY NodeMCU running ESPEasy with DHT22s and photoresistors. I’m not running them off battery and you are not looking for DIY so I won’t same more about those.
I’ve also three Govee H5072. They run on 3 AAA batteries and I’ve had one going since March and it’s at 80% battery level. However, it’s BTLE and there is no binding for it so I had to write (with the help of a couple of other projects) an addon to my sensor_reporter that listens for the broadcasts from these sensors and publishes them over MQTT.
I’m very happy with them. They run around $15 each which is a little high but it has a screen (which was also a requirement for a couple of my sensors) and most of the cheaper ones do not. But they have a very fast reporting time (every second). And I’m already running sensor_reporter on a lot of machines so it’s no big deal to spin up a special service for this purpose.
Colleages of me are running Conbee´s and are happy with it, too.
I won´t recommend the CC2531, for me it was not very reliable when using Zigbee 3.0 Support.
The coverage depends on your Zigbee network. You can have some Zigbee-Bulbs that act as a zigbee-router/repeater without any additional hardware, or use one zigbee2mqtt instance per floor reporting to your central mqtt-broker.
I used the original Xiaomi-Gateway before, and it was very reliable and could run without cloud. But when Xiaomi brought out their Zigbee 3.0 Luminance Senors they were not supported on this gateway.
I finished writing a bluetooth binding for all of Govee temperature sensors a few weeks ago. I’m using a h5074, they are great little devices. Currently waiting on the PR for the binding to get merged but I expect it will get merged soon.
That’s great! The only problem for me is I don’t have BT on the machine where OH runs and I’m out of usb ports. I’ll have to get a hub and a single to use it. But having a binding is fantastic! They are great devices!
