I’m trying to find some wireless sensors but the options available are overwhelming and every time I find something that seems decent, it gets ruined by being cloud based with the manufacturers servers. For example wirelesstags dot net seem perfect but then I see it uses their cloud and the HA integration seems to connect to their cloud so that’s out (Wireless Sensor Tags - Home Assistant)
My HASS setup: HA OS running as a VM in proxmox.
I need:
Sensors for temperature/humidity (will be used in rooms, in a deep freeze and possibly outside)
Sensors for doors/windows being open or closed
Some kind of hub or controller that is networked to interface with those sensors and works seamlessly with HA (my proxmox VMs are set up for redundancy if there’s a hardware failure so USB dongles are out).
The sensors must:
Either have zero cloud, or if they do have optional cloud can work 100% without it. Basically if either my internet goes our or the manufacturer shuts down I want no impact on my monitoring.
be wireless, don’t care what communication protocol. having to change batteries not an issue.
be a complete, non-DiY solution. I don’t want to have to source rasbery pis or components and solder anything, I don’t have those skills or the time. I just want to buy them, configure them and forget about them.
Additional info: I live in the middle of nowhere canada so things available on amazon are ideal, other online shops who ship here also acceptable. I have to check the shipping info for any others since it can be a huge problem sometimes.
Welcome to the forums.
There are approx 130,000 members here and most of them have posted at least once. There is so much reading here that I’m pretty sure you have not got to much of it in the few minutes you have been a member.
This question is asked probably once a day, so maybe do a search and see what answers others have received. I know this is your first question, but some people who regularly answer questions tend to ignore these.
There are tips and hints on some of your question directly and how to use the forums and how to effectively search, etc, here in a Post a bunch of us made up for new faces to help them along.
You can use the ethernet based zigbee antenna to get those devices into the system and the rest use matter over wifi (does not rely on a border router) or matter over thread based (you just need a thread border router for these), this will give you the overall best solution to your needs based on your requirements.
As such for door and window sensors I recommend the Aqara P2
For a thread border router I recommend the GL-S200 so you don’t need to rely on apple or google etc based devices on the network to provide this.
You should be able to place these sensors outside as well in spots that are not affected by rain.
See what is available in your region based on these suggestions and budget.
I currently use the P2 sensors and they have a long battery life so far, and I use a zigbee based SNZB-02P for the lounge room humidity tracking that has been working well. They run all local and don’t need any 3rd party accounts or are reliant on proprietary hubs.
Edit: instead of the GL-S200 and the base 06 you can look into the 06M that does both zigbee and thread:
I just saw it on their page it and may be the better overall option for those that want a simpler combo to work with, that said I am not sure if it will suffer the same issues that the skyconnect had with multipan so those that have tested it can validate.
Just a quick replay. In my opinion go with zigbee. It will fully meet your requirements. But probably z-wave also. You have network based zigbee coordinator so it dont need to be usb. All zigbee devices that I bought, and all of them are from China, are local controlled devices. No cloud nothing.