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  • I have a mix of Sonoff and IKEA. Both work well for me, but the IKEA DIRIGERA API reports the IKEA TIMMERFLOTTE as two separate devices with different names, and it messed up my Grafana dashboard.

    It's the most first world of first world problems, but purely for that reason any more I buy will be Sonoff.

  • I got a bunch of the Aqara WSDCGQ11LM's around my house, and every single one after 3-6 months the battery is dead. The Zigbee network in my house is strong, and stable and yet they keep running out of battery.

    Once out of battery, replacing the battery means you need to re-pair them to the network since they don't rejoin automatically. Thankfully Home Assistant sees it as the same device, but it has been a pain, and the batteries get expensive really quickly.

    I've been slowly replacing them with Ikea's Matter sensors instead, they have a display that comes on when you tap them, and join the rest of my Thread network. Slowly over time I am likely to replace all of my Zigbee based devices with Matter/Thread based devices because it seems to be far more stable for my use cases than most of my Zigbee devices, especially battery powered ones seem to last much longer when using the Matter/Thread based versions.

  • 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.

  • The nicknames for the sensors is really annoying. I could only get one of the dots to actually tell me anything, and scrolling back and forth for the key suuuucks
  • 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 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.

  • Sadly it's missing Ikea one. They are cheap and most importantly, use AAA standard batteries instead of the coin cell type.

    Ikea selle rechargable ones for really cheap additionally.

    by DocG
  • 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.

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