Yet another Hacker News

Testing 12 different Zigbee temperature/humidity sensors

26 points walrus01 1 day ago 5 comments

kadoban 1 day ago | parent

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.

cmckn 59 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

parineum 43 minutes ago | parent

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.

nijave 19 minutes ago | parent

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.

cyberax 1 hour ago | parent

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.