Hi, Sorry if this is a common topic that appears but after a day and a half of googling and Youtube I am none the wiser on devices worth purchasing.
I desire the following items, that must all function locally (no cloud/user account nonsense)
Smart plugs with energy monitoring - (13A required)
Smart plugs without energy monitoring
Environmental sensors (temp, humidity) - Air quality would be of interest
Smoke alarm with or without additional sensing, open to options.
HA will be running as a VM on my NAS, and I am open to the idea of adding z-wave radio if required. I have other expansion desires linked to CCTV, exterior lighting, interior mood lighting, audio and heating control but that’s not really required until the foundations of the system are estabilished.
I would also like to be able to aquire the devices via amazon/ebay for the sake of convenience, and ideally avoid modifying devices like my recent learning of the ikea air quality sensor hacked with a esp8266.
Thank you taking the time to read, and I appreciate the help.
For fundamentals I will go with zigbee stick and zigbee devices with zigbee2mqtt. Yeah, I know oh zigbeee.
But I have around 70 zigbee devices currently and they just work. They all work as local devices no cloud, no tampering with settings, just plug pair and go.
Well I have a few aquara plugs, some xiaomi devices and majority are tuya devices. And everything works. In my experience it’s less to the end device. It’s about coordinator.
You have to buy good coordinator based on 26* chip preferably with an antenna. You don’t have to go to some brand names. Don’t be cheap on coordinator.
I agree with @ddaniel , although I mostly use ZHA.
I don’t think Aqara make smart outlets for the UK. This is a shame as Aqara products are good.
I haven’t bought any outlets with energy monitoring in a while so cannot advise on these.
For outlets without monitoring I’ve recently bought these:
[Woolley Outlet](Woolley Zigbee Smart Plug, Woolley Mini Outlet Socket Compatible with Alexa, Google Home and eWelink App- 10A/2200W (Woolley Zigbee Hub Required) https://amzn.eu/d/0cAzcDr)
These are cheap and work well.
There are also ZigBee multigang strips too for the UK.
Does the hive mind of this forum believe the devices selected meet my requirements of not wanting devices that phone home to random servers for no good reason aside from data mining, etc. Or am I missing something that is inherent with zigbee devices means its not a concern? It appears to be a topic that is rarely mentioned on the various channels i’ve been skimming on youtube, unless its being dealt with at network infrastructure level by net-admin wizards?
Thanks for the nod towards the search function, I’ll start digging.
Can I get some help in selecting a zigbee dongle, there is a Sonoff “zigbee 3” model ZBDongle-P on amazon, which I wish I could hyperlink too, but as a new forum member rules are rules. It supports ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT, but I’ve just learnt about “Matter” and if there is a better coordinator that I should be looking at then I appreciate the help.
The Sonoff Temperature and Humidity sensor is fine. I have 2.
I’ve looked at the Ajax outlets myself and my only concern is the low review score. It may be worth buying one and testing it before you invest too much money.
ZigBee devices cannot phone home to the cloud unless the hub they are connected to does. In your case, with HA, you are in control. There will be no phoning home unless you connect HA to Alexa or Google. Even then you’re in control.
For a controller (coordinator) I have a Conbee II and a Sonoff ZigBee 3 P. I’m happy with both.