I put the Ikea Thread sensor in my fridge a while back and it's been a lot more useful than I expected. My fridge had been periodically getting too cold or too hot, I suspect the issue is that the captive touch buttons that control the temp get occasionally bumped, changing the set temperature. With the thread sensor I can have Home Assistant send me an alert when the fridge leaves the safe zone for too long so I can manually correct it.
It's also been interesting to see when placing hot food in the fridge how long the temperature stays elevated for. I put the sensor in a ziplock bag and sucked the air out of it so it has weatherproofing.
One of the things I never see in reports like this is what sensor is being used (is it a Bosch unit? Sensiron? Plain thermistor? Pixies and Fairy Dust? Some bodged together 1wire deal?) and what MCU (Nordic? Espresif? Microchip? Something else?) as those have a huge bearing on what the sensor is actually capable of, and would say a lot about precision/accuracy and battery life.
I seriously looked at yolink for fridge/freezer sensors, but just couldn’t stomach their pricing in Canada. (e.g. the Local Hub is 200 USD in the US, or 285 USD in Canada.)
I ended up with some Ecowitt (hardware sold under the Ambient Weather brand in the US) sensors and they’ve been working great for some months now. (900mhz RF has good penetration and the sensor hardware is generally appropriate for -20C operation.)
I have to agree. Aqara make some excellent hardware, but their Zigbee firmware is typically awful. Their battery-powered switches also drop off the network at random.
I have several E1 wired switches and had to resort to replacing the firmware on them[0]. They don't drop off the network as their sleepy end devices tend to, but they also can't be bound to other devices.
Hmm interesting I have 4-5 of them and quite like them. They've all stayed connected over a year except 1 which I just replaced the battery in and I think that fixed it. It was reporting 40% battery but would drop off shortly after connecting.
Aqara might be the ones with a crappy ZigBee implementation that doesn't roam right so if you move them or your topology changes, they'll drop off.
It's a known issue with them that they don't ever change their routing. If you connect them in a different place than you use them, you're going to have suboptimal to unusable routes.
Hah. I did something similar a while ago, but I also did full saturated salt solution humidity calibration. It's very simple to do: get several different salts, create a saturated solution in a sealed container, and observe the humidity there.
The best sensor in my tests was CentraLite 3310-G. It was the only one actually precise to 1% of RH and 0.1C They are also pretty robust and long-lasting.
> you absolutely must press the pairing button on the sensor first to wake it up before sending the new reporting configuration. Sending the payload while the device is asleep just gets ignored
This stuff is still so user unfriendly.
Why cannot the software just save the desired setting to set it when the device comes online next?
I feel like many things in zigbee2mqtt are like that: I click something, it fires off some message and it often isn't clear if that worked, if it'll work later, and so on.
I put the Ikea Thread sensor in my fridge a while back and it's been a lot more useful than I expected. My fridge had been periodically getting too cold or too hot, I suspect the issue is that the captive touch buttons that control the temp get occasionally bumped, changing the set temperature. With the thread sensor I can have Home Assistant send me an alert when the fridge leaves the safe zone for too long so I can manually correct it.
It's also been interesting to see when placing hot food in the fridge how long the temperature stays elevated for. I put the sensor in a ziplock bag and sucked the air out of it so it has weatherproofing.
One of the things I never see in reports like this is what sensor is being used (is it a Bosch unit? Sensiron? Plain thermistor? Pixies and Fairy Dust? Some bodged together 1wire deal?) and what MCU (Nordic? Espresif? Microchip? Something else?) as those have a huge bearing on what the sensor is actually capable of, and would say a lot about precision/accuracy and battery life.
It's not Zigbee, but I've been very happy with Yolink and several of the products in their ecosystem.
I seriously looked at yolink for fridge/freezer sensors, but just couldn’t stomach their pricing in Canada. (e.g. the Local Hub is 200 USD in the US, or 285 USD in Canada.)
I ended up with some Ecowitt (hardware sold under the Ambient Weather brand in the US) sensors and they’ve been working great for some months now. (900mhz RF has good penetration and the sensor hardware is generally appropriate for -20C operation.)
I like Govee, using both bluetooth and wifi models
Do _not_ get the Aqara ones. The things will not stay connected for shit.
I have a couple of the Tuya ones and I'm pleased with them. The humidity accuracy is questionable, but it's fine.
I also have an airgradient (not zigbee, uses wifi) for high accuracy the one place I care about that. Works great in Home Assistant with esphome.
I have to agree. Aqara make some excellent hardware, but their Zigbee firmware is typically awful. Their battery-powered switches also drop off the network at random.
I have several E1 wired switches and had to resort to replacing the firmware on them[0]. They don't drop off the network as their sleepy end devices tend to, but they also can't be bound to other devices.
[0] https://www.ducktoast.com/blog/electronics-projects/aqara-e1...
Hmm interesting I have 4-5 of them and quite like them. They've all stayed connected over a year except 1 which I just replaced the battery in and I think that fixed it. It was reporting 40% battery but would drop off shortly after connecting.
Aqara might be the ones with a crappy ZigBee implementation that doesn't roam right so if you move them or your topology changes, they'll drop off.
> Do _not_ get the Aqara ones. The things will not stay connected for shit.
+1, complete waste of time and money. I thought my Zigbee network or HA was the problem, but the sensors are just garbage.
It's a known issue with them that they don't ever change their routing. If you connect them in a different place than you use them, you're going to have suboptimal to unusable routes.
Hah. I did something similar a while ago, but I also did full saturated salt solution humidity calibration. It's very simple to do: get several different salts, create a saturated solution in a sealed container, and observe the humidity there.
The best sensor in my tests was CentraLite 3310-G. It was the only one actually precise to 1% of RH and 0.1C They are also pretty robust and long-lasting.
> you absolutely must press the pairing button on the sensor first to wake it up before sending the new reporting configuration. Sending the payload while the device is asleep just gets ignored
This stuff is still so user unfriendly.
Why cannot the software just save the desired setting to set it when the device comes online next? I feel like many things in zigbee2mqtt are like that: I click something, it fires off some message and it often isn't clear if that worked, if it'll work later, and so on.