I totally understand all of the wireless stuff and love it in general. But, building new, I don’t really want to have to replace these batteries down the road.
Is there a device that will do 20-25ish dry contacts as input in one/three wireless devices that will connect to HA? Either Z-Wave or Zigbee? I guess WiFi would be okay too.
Just thinking I’d like to add a bunch of sensors in only one or three devices into HA and not add a crazy amount of air traffic.
I have almost 100 devices on my router. No issues with congestion. 18 dry contacts- In ESPHome there is the MCP23016 Component which gives you 16 GPIO ports from one. Two would give you 32 ports.
I guess I very much had a “air traffic” problem but that was at the time I still used zigbee devices. Some devices were going “dark” occasionally. Not sure why because this ZigBee devices are not debuggable. Maybe the neighbors WiFi is to strong? No idea but I solved it by getting rid of all ZigBee devices and switching to wifi/Ethernet ones running esphome. Now I have like 5 times the devices on my WiFi router and everything is rock solid.
The biggest problem with the low power ZigBee is the low range and poor penitration. My WiFi devices easily cover 5 times the range with 5 times more obsticales than that what my ZigBee gear was capable of.