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.
show comments
DocG
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.
show comments
Gigachad
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.
show comments
X-Istence
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.
show comments
kadoban
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.
show comments
marsbars241
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
show comments
kiselio
This site appears to focus on cheap aliexpress shit, which I highly appreciate. No one really talks about those $3-$5 chinese sensors, yet they are on par or better compared to tier A brands in some cases. I mean, what are you really asking from a temp sensor? Your living room isn't a lab or something, where precise measurements are needed.
How does Zigbee compare to Matter? (as in, devices in the market, I know they are different levels but from a consumer perspective, there are zigbee switches and matter switches..) I've been using Matter switches because of HomeKit. Been pretty happy.
I do not have any Zigbee devices but I have many Hue devices. Their connectivity is shit. Button presses are not being registered. Sometimes commands do not reach devices etc. That's why I tried to avoid Zigbee.
But the low power battery operated zigbee stuff are pretty attractive if things work fine.
show comments
R_mand
Testing a single unit and assuming the rest of the production units have the same variance is quite risky. Some sensor manufacturers calibrate at factory but even then we’ve seen outliers.
Havoc
Temp and humidity tends to be fairly reliable.
CO2 and equivalents on the other hand is Wild West.
show comments
petepete
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.
pbowyer
I'm just about to build my own external temperature and humidity sensor, using a Sensiron SHT45 sensor with integrated PTFE filter.
I've had Tuya and Aqara sensors outside, undercover and out of direct rain for the past 3 years, and every one lasts about a year before the humidity sensor gets stuck at the maximum reading. Even bringing it indoors doesn't get it working again. I'm hoping the built-in heater on the SHT45 will help when we're sat in sea mist or sea fog and keep the sensor working for longer.
tzs
> To get an accurate base for benchmarks, I decided to calibrate it against a lab-certified thermometer at a friend’s butcher shop, as weirdly as that sounds. His particular thermometer gets checked and calibrated by the state on a schedule (every 3 months) because it sits inside a commercial meat refrigerator and it is required by law. After calibration, my MHO-C401 needed an offset of minus 0.5°C and plus 4% humidity to match the reference reading exactly.
> It is worth clarifying from the start that my setup does not represent typical room comfort conditions, since the calibration was done at a much lower temperature, around 4°C. Sensors do not always respond in a perfectly straight line across a wide temperature range, so this fixed point is not a guarantee of the exact same accuracy at room temperature.
This can be fixed pretty easily if you are up to a little simple DIY.
Instead of using the MHO-C401, calibrated at one point against a lab-certified thermometer, build on a solderless breadboard your own temperature/humidity sensor using an ESP32 or ESP8266 dev board and a Sensiron SHT45 temperature/humidity sensor and program it using Arduino.
The SHT45 communicates with the ESP over I2C. The wiring is simple: ESP 3.3V, GND, SDA, SCL to SHT45 VCC, GND, SDA, SCL, in that order. Just 4 wires. The ESP dev board will be powered by USB. (If you need it to be battery powered, just use a small USB power bank).
The SHT45 has an accuracy of ±1% RH and ±0.1℃ out of the box.
If you want even better temperature accuracy add a tmp119 temperature sensor. This too uses I2C so the hookup is the same as the SHT45 hookup. It has a temperature accuracy of ±0.08℃ max and it typically is ±0.03℃ and is NIST-traceable out of the box. This is across a range of 0℃ to 45℃. (Outside that range it is ±0.2℃ from -55℃ to 150℃).
Adafruit has all the sensors [1][2]. Those have JST connectors using a standard pinout for daisy chaining I2C devices, which would be good for this application so when measuring temperature in the fridge or freeze you don't have to put the whole breadboard assembly in there. They have cables up to 400mm long [3].
You know what...you don't even actually need the breadboard! Here's a JST to female socket cable [4] that could connect one of the sensors to the pins on the ESP dev board.
ESP, that cable to the sensor, and if using two sensors, the sensors daisy chained with JST to JST cable.
Adafruit has ESPs also, but they seem to be out of stock on most of them. There are plenty of suitable ones on Amazon that are pretty inexpensive.
I'd say go for an ESP32 C5 or C6. They both support 2.4 GHz wifi and Zigbee, so your have the choice of reporting reading to a web server or making your DIY reference temp/humidity sensor use Zigbee. The Arduino library from ESP includes built in classes to make making Zigbee sensors easy.
Oh, they also support Matter over wifi, so you could make this a Matter device.
The C5 adds 5 GHz wifi.
Just remember that an ESP32 generates enough heat due to the radio that these sensors will pick it up if the are too close. If you build on a breadboard don't be the sensors right next to the ESP.
This is a fairly reasonable first project if you've not done any MCU stuff before but do have programming experience, especially nowadays with LLMs. They seem to have a pretty good grasp of Arduino stuff. (Don't just vibe code it! Just use them when you get stuck on something or want some documentation clarified or things like that. That will be a lot more interesting).
I recently tested a bunch including a lab-grade transmitter setup as control. My focus was on temperature in a lab refrigerator for home use and RuuviTag Pro was the best. You can also modify the firmware yourself which is a huge bonus. Pair with Shelly as a gateway and it’s quite useful.
timvdalen
I have 12 of the Aqara's deployed in my house. Initial setup was frustrating for some (they would lose connection after a day), but now that my Zigbee network is a little more solid (the Aqara's don't seem to use IKEA smart plugs as routers) I don't have any issues.
show comments
unglaublich
I have the RSH-HS03 which also has a small LCD display. Perfect device for in the bathroom. It controls my dehumidifier.
quasarj
No mention of models that can survive outside. I'm not sure how useful an indoor sensor is??
show comments
rkagerer
It's not Zigbee, but I've been very happy with Yolink and several of the products in their ecosystem.
show comments
cyberax
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.
bartekrutkowski
I tried quite few "smart" things and I hate them with passion.
Smart light bulbs, for whatever reason I couldn't get them to work with my Apple Home setup, despite trying few different brands.
Smart power sockets, kind of work, but they're big, bulky and have this natural design flaw where when anyone unknowingly or out of habit use the lamp's switch, they stop working, not to mention how useless they are when the wall socket is behind some obstacle, furniture, etc.
Smart radiator controllers that are super noisy in operation and impossible to calibrate, so they constantly report inaccurate temperatures.
Smart home security systems that keep raising false alarms because a cat, a leaf, a bee, a spider or just because.
IKEA smart temperature and humidity sensors (the latest ones) that pair with my Apple Home network for few days and they all just stop reporting data, until a hard reset and re-pairing.
I'm done for anything "smart" for at least few years, they're all a horrible annoyance.
nh2
> 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.
show comments
walrus01
I'm a bit curious how this is showing up as posted 4 hours ago because I'm pretty sure I remember posting it about 2 days ago. Maybe it got stuck in a silent spam/moderation queue before getting approved?
show comments
SoftTalker
I have a German-made Fischer humidity/temperature gauge on the wall. It doesn't take any batteries, or require any software.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
This site appears to focus on cheap aliexpress shit, which I highly appreciate. No one really talks about those $3-$5 chinese sensors, yet they are on par or better compared to tier A brands in some cases. I mean, what are you really asking from a temp sensor? Your living room isn't a lab or something, where precise measurements are needed.
Also, I don't know if anyone saw but there's a giant list of amazon prime discounts on there rn: https://smarthomescene.com/news/best-smart-home-deals-for-am...
How does Zigbee compare to Matter? (as in, devices in the market, I know they are different levels but from a consumer perspective, there are zigbee switches and matter switches..) I've been using Matter switches because of HomeKit. Been pretty happy.
I do not have any Zigbee devices but I have many Hue devices. Their connectivity is shit. Button presses are not being registered. Sometimes commands do not reach devices etc. That's why I tried to avoid Zigbee.
But the low power battery operated zigbee stuff are pretty attractive if things work fine.
Testing a single unit and assuming the rest of the production units have the same variance is quite risky. Some sensor manufacturers calibrate at factory but even then we’ve seen outliers.
Temp and humidity tends to be fairly reliable.
CO2 and equivalents on the other hand is Wild West.
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'm just about to build my own external temperature and humidity sensor, using a Sensiron SHT45 sensor with integrated PTFE filter.
I've had Tuya and Aqara sensors outside, undercover and out of direct rain for the past 3 years, and every one lasts about a year before the humidity sensor gets stuck at the maximum reading. Even bringing it indoors doesn't get it working again. I'm hoping the built-in heater on the SHT45 will help when we're sat in sea mist or sea fog and keep the sensor working for longer.
> To get an accurate base for benchmarks, I decided to calibrate it against a lab-certified thermometer at a friend’s butcher shop, as weirdly as that sounds. His particular thermometer gets checked and calibrated by the state on a schedule (every 3 months) because it sits inside a commercial meat refrigerator and it is required by law. After calibration, my MHO-C401 needed an offset of minus 0.5°C and plus 4% humidity to match the reference reading exactly.
> It is worth clarifying from the start that my setup does not represent typical room comfort conditions, since the calibration was done at a much lower temperature, around 4°C. Sensors do not always respond in a perfectly straight line across a wide temperature range, so this fixed point is not a guarantee of the exact same accuracy at room temperature.
This can be fixed pretty easily if you are up to a little simple DIY.
Instead of using the MHO-C401, calibrated at one point against a lab-certified thermometer, build on a solderless breadboard your own temperature/humidity sensor using an ESP32 or ESP8266 dev board and a Sensiron SHT45 temperature/humidity sensor and program it using Arduino.
The SHT45 communicates with the ESP over I2C. The wiring is simple: ESP 3.3V, GND, SDA, SCL to SHT45 VCC, GND, SDA, SCL, in that order. Just 4 wires. The ESP dev board will be powered by USB. (If you need it to be battery powered, just use a small USB power bank).
The SHT45 has an accuracy of ±1% RH and ±0.1℃ out of the box.
If you want even better temperature accuracy add a tmp119 temperature sensor. This too uses I2C so the hookup is the same as the SHT45 hookup. It has a temperature accuracy of ±0.08℃ max and it typically is ±0.03℃ and is NIST-traceable out of the box. This is across a range of 0℃ to 45℃. (Outside that range it is ±0.2℃ from -55℃ to 150℃).
Adafruit has all the sensors [1][2]. Those have JST connectors using a standard pinout for daisy chaining I2C devices, which would be good for this application so when measuring temperature in the fridge or freeze you don't have to put the whole breadboard assembly in there. They have cables up to 400mm long [3].
You know what...you don't even actually need the breadboard! Here's a JST to female socket cable [4] that could connect one of the sensors to the pins on the ESP dev board.
ESP, that cable to the sensor, and if using two sensors, the sensors daisy chained with JST to JST cable.
Adafruit has ESPs also, but they seem to be out of stock on most of them. There are plenty of suitable ones on Amazon that are pretty inexpensive.
I'd say go for an ESP32 C5 or C6. They both support 2.4 GHz wifi and Zigbee, so your have the choice of reporting reading to a web server or making your DIY reference temp/humidity sensor use Zigbee. The Arduino library from ESP includes built in classes to make making Zigbee sensors easy.
Oh, they also support Matter over wifi, so you could make this a Matter device.
The C5 adds 5 GHz wifi.
Just remember that an ESP32 generates enough heat due to the radio that these sensors will pick it up if the are too close. If you build on a breadboard don't be the sensors right next to the ESP.
This is a fairly reasonable first project if you've not done any MCU stuff before but do have programming experience, especially nowadays with LLMs. They seem to have a pretty good grasp of Arduino stuff. (Don't just vibe code it! Just use them when you get stuck on something or want some documentation clarified or things like that. That will be a lot more interesting).
[1] https://www.adafruit.com/product/5665
[2] https://www.adafruit.com/product/6482
[3] https://www.adafruit.com/product/5385
[4] https://www.adafruit.com/product/4397
I recently tested a bunch including a lab-grade transmitter setup as control. My focus was on temperature in a lab refrigerator for home use and RuuviTag Pro was the best. You can also modify the firmware yourself which is a huge bonus. Pair with Shelly as a gateway and it’s quite useful.
I have 12 of the Aqara's deployed in my house. Initial setup was frustrating for some (they would lose connection after a day), but now that my Zigbee network is a little more solid (the Aqara's don't seem to use IKEA smart plugs as routers) I don't have any issues.
I have the RSH-HS03 which also has a small LCD display. Perfect device for in the bathroom. It controls my dehumidifier.
No mention of models that can survive outside. I'm not sure how useful an indoor sensor is??
It's not Zigbee, but I've been very happy with Yolink and several of the products in their ecosystem.
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.
I tried quite few "smart" things and I hate them with passion.
Smart light bulbs, for whatever reason I couldn't get them to work with my Apple Home setup, despite trying few different brands.
Smart power sockets, kind of work, but they're big, bulky and have this natural design flaw where when anyone unknowingly or out of habit use the lamp's switch, they stop working, not to mention how useless they are when the wall socket is behind some obstacle, furniture, etc.
Smart radiator controllers that are super noisy in operation and impossible to calibrate, so they constantly report inaccurate temperatures.
Smart home security systems that keep raising false alarms because a cat, a leaf, a bee, a spider or just because.
IKEA smart temperature and humidity sensors (the latest ones) that pair with my Apple Home network for few days and they all just stop reporting data, until a hard reset and re-pairing.
I'm done for anything "smart" for at least few years, they're all a horrible annoyance.
> 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'm a bit curious how this is showing up as posted 4 hours ago because I'm pretty sure I remember posting it about 2 days ago. Maybe it got stuck in a silent spam/moderation queue before getting approved?
I have a German-made Fischer humidity/temperature gauge on the wall. It doesn't take any batteries, or require any software.