Plant watering monitor.. and aliexpress!

Hardware
1

I bought a couple of these to monitor some house plants. It was more of an experiment than anything, and they were cheap:-

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007329498149.html

They seemed to do their job, but the battery life is appauling. Despite using 2 x AAA batteries, they lose maybe 1-2% a DAY.

Add to that, one of the devices dropped off my zigbee network and try as I may, I cannot get it to re-connect. New Batteries, re-pairing fails, it just refuses to play ball.

Worth a punt at £6-7 ? Sure. Long term solution for plant watering… ? No.

Anyone else have any of these ?

Also, what else are people using for this kind of thing ?

2

I have an Ecowitt weather station, so adding some of their sensors was a no-brainer. I get 4 months out of one of the expensive lithium alkaline AA batteries.

3

I use the Ecowitt WH51. I have one in the lawn, garden, and potted banana plant. All are part of automations in HA the first 2 are sensor for automation I run for my sprinkler and the banana plant sensor is used for a water valve.

4

Measured how?
Batteries have big initial voltage drop, if it’s not considered properly on sensing code, you might see some incorrect numbers.

5

I’m simply tracking the battery % as recorded by HA… All other (zigbee) devices I have, including those which also use AA or AAA batteries don’t show this level of drain.

6

HA reports what the device says, if the battery monitoring is done incorrectly with some uncalibrated voltage approach, initial drop can be higher than real one.
If it continues to drop at same speed, then the problem might be real.