Purchased a HA green over the holidays and want to add a contact sensor to my garage door. I saw a contact sensor by a company called ThirdReality on Amazon and I am thinking of pairing this with a Sonoff Zigbee/Thread ESB antenna to add those services to my HA Green. I saw someone mentioning that I should go with the Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 instead, which is a little more expensive. Does this sound like a good investment?
ikea has decent cheap zigbee door sensors, at least until they run out if stock. parasoll
Thanks. Which zigbee antenna do you recommend or that require Ikea’s proprietary bridge?
I have only used the home assistant zbt1 and now the new zbt2.
Both have worked great for me, the zbt2 is larger and of similar design as the zwa (z-wave).
I don’t use the ikea hub, all of the ‘legacy’ ikea devices are zigbee, while ikea has new products rolling out that are thread/matter based. I don’t have or use any ikea account, they just pair and work over zigbee in ha, with either zha (simple and easy) or zigbee2mqtt (more complex but more powerful).
There are a couple related threads about those newer products and many many threads about the zigbee devices.
You can probably review ikea’s website, narrow down the devices that interest you, then search here or google for others experiences with them.
Check out this video for comparing contact sensors:
Spoiler: the Aqara contact sensor is the clear winner
For coordinators you can take a look here https://smlight.tech/