Hi everyone
I have a strange, very reproducible problem with mmWave presence detection in one specific room of my house — my kitchen — and I’m hoping someone here has seen something similar, because at this point I’ve ruled out the sensors themselves.
Roughly once a month, the presence sensor in the kitchen gets stuck reporting “presence detected” (ghost presence) even when the room is empty. On my current sensor (a CeilSense), pressing the “Dynamic background calibration” button clears it immediately, and then everything works perfectly again… for about another month. Then it happens again.
If this were random RF noise, interference, or a misconfiguration, I’d expect it to happen at irregular intervals — sometimes twice a week, sometimes not for months. Instead it’s consistently ~monthly, and a single recalibration (in the case of the ceilsense)/restart (for the other devices) fully fixes it every time.
This has now happened with four different devices from three different manufacturers, connected through different protocols/integrations:
- Aqara FP2 (wifi + homekit)
- Two different Sonoff presence sensors (zigbee)
- CeilSense (current) (wifi + EspHome)
Every single one of them behaved the same way in the kitchen: weeks of flawless operation, then stuck presence, then fine again after a restart/recalibration.
After moving the older sensors to different rooms, they’ve all been running for months with zero issues.
Same devices, same firmware, same Home Assistant instance — the only variable is the room.
So something about my kitchen environment seems to slowly “poison” the sensor until it locks into a false-presence state.
- Could a periodically-changing static environment (fridge compressor cycles, extractor fan, slowly moving objects, metal surfaces/appliances) gradually corrupt the background model until it needs a re-baseline?
- Has anyone seen mmWave background calibration drift that accumulates over weeks rather than causing immediate false positives?
- Is there a known pattern of kitchens specifically being hostile to mmWave sensors (moving reflective surfaces, appliances with vibrating motors, etc.)?
- Is there any way to automate or schedule the background recalibration from Home Assistant as a workaround, without losing presence detection reliability?
I’m happy to share anything that would help diagnose this: photos of the kitchen, a floor plan/diagram with sensor placement, appliance locations, sensor settings, HA logs — whatever you need. I just want presence detection to work reliably in this room.
Thanks in advance!