Any updates on if this now works with ZHA with the new quirk? I assume you do not need the gateway (i have sonoff stick)
How is the battery life? Can you recharge it via usb or only solar? I have a closed lid hot tub so wouldn’t get daily sun…?
I have a salt pool with electrolyzer I have the impression that for the measurement of the orp and chlorine donations is correct it is necessary to add stabilizer in the pool otherwise the value of the orp is too low even with calibration.
Hi, what kind of stabilizer do you mean? Chlorine or water hardness stabilizer?
Cyanic acid
@Kiki3872. This is a complex chemistry question. But the short answer is you can take your pick if you use stabiliser or not (Cyanuric Acid), and there are pros and cons of using it.
Understanding this in details, actually quite a complicated chemistry question, that I suspect even a lot of pool shops don’t really understand well. By the following is my laymans description of my understanding as an ametaur chemist and interested pool owner who has looked closely into this to find the thing that works best for me.
Chlorine is significantly reduced in the water with sunlight. And stabiliser significant reduces the chlorine in the water that is lost to sunlight (UV) and heat. So adding stabiliser to the pool helps you maintain higher levels of chlorine in the water (think of stabiliser binding to the chlorine during sunlight hours in bind the chlorine up and reduce its loss to the UV light.
So the more stabiliser you have in the water, the more likely you will have a higher chlorine level reading when you or your pool shop does do a chlorine measurment. And/or reduce the amount of chlorine you need to add (or in your case generate) to maintain that.
However, this is only half the story. Because when the stabiliser binds the chlorine up to reduce its loss to sunlight, it also reduces the effectiveness of Chlorine to kill bacteria. So too much stabiliser can affect the ability for chlorine to do the job it is there for which is to kill the bacteria. So measurement of chlorine is not good enough on its own to tell you have effectively the bacteria is being killed. You need to also measure stabiliser (too much is a bad thing even if chlorine is high). And also pH which also affects how well chlorine is at killing bacteria. So this is why any good pool person will be measuring all these things and making sure they are in acceptible ranges (not too much or not too little).
So now to ORP. ORP is a measure of “Oxidation Reduction Potential”. In your pool, Chlorine is the oxidiser which is killing the bacteria via oxidisation. And I suspect this is much more important than chlorine to maintain at a high level. And I will leave a professional to correct me, but I believe in commercial pools, the regulations will be mostly focused on maintaining a high ORP for safety reason in public pools. And the effectiveness of this oxidisation is negatively affected by stabiliser. So the same amount of chlorine in the water should produce a HIGHER ORP number with less stabiliser than the other way around. ie opposite to what you appear to be saying in your post (all other things being equal). But on the flip side, if you only run you pump overnight (and maybe not enough runtime to generate enough chlorine), and have long hot days in summer with knocking all the chlorine out in a pool with no stabiliser, you might have no chlorine in the pool at the end of the day, and no chlorine will give no oxidisation and thus low ORP.
If you can measure ORP, you can probably see this in the ORP measurements. ie for arguements sake, if you have a pool with no stabiliser that is reading say 650 ORP typically. If you added 50ppm of ORP, the you will almost certainly find the max ORP you can reach, even with HEAPS of chlorine will be well below that.
You will probably also see the effect of sunlight in ORP if you measure it. If you have higher level of stabiliser in the pool, I suspect as the sun comes up, you might see ORP start to drop (as you would expect to see in a pool without stabiliser). In the stabiliser pool, some of this will be the stabiliser binding with the chlorine which will reduce the ORP. But you will probably also get some recovery as I think the stabiliser will release some of this chlorine when the sun goes down.
So it is about getting the right balance of these things for your circumstances.
Because most pool shops need to keep to the KISS principle (Keep It Simple Stupid), here where I am in hot and sunny Australia they like to recommend 30-50ppm stabiliser. Which I recon is probably pretty sensible once you factor in a lot of people are really falling FAR short of best practice on how they dose their pool with Chlorine (eg how much they add and how frequently in manual pools, and how much and how often they run their Chlorinator for salt pools). But I strongly suspect this is far from optimal for someone who properly manages their pool and keeps the Chlorine up, because I suspect at these levels of stabiliser, you would struggle to maintain the “ideal” ORP levels. And I suspect it would be impossible for a commerical pool to maintain the ORP levels I believe they are required to maintain for public safely (ie they are a bigger sespool than a private pool that gets less use).
For me, I probably mostly run almost no stabiliser in my pool and make sure I maintain the ORP. With this, I don’t really need to worry about Chlorine levels beyond that, as I know they are enough to be effective (ORP is a much better measure of this effectiveness anyway). And this is probably at low end of the Chlorine spectrum (or in my case, probably similar, but much higher levels of sanitation). If you can do that, you really don’t need a lot of stabiliser. But having said that, I have a Chlorinator that measures ORP, and measures and dose acid. And with this, I can be more confident with exactly what is going on. And know that my pH is always at the right level to make chlorine effective etc etc. Having said that, I don’t recommend this setup for everyone, as unless you keep an eye on it, and are aware of small signs of water quality changes, they can lead to a false sense of security as the probate are always prone to calibrate drift, especially if you don’t have everything in balance and well maintained. That that is when it is better to fall back to the KISS principle.
Having said all of that, I feel it is importan to point out that the device measure above (and similar), despite the claim, almost certainly DOES NOT MEASURE “Fee chlorine”. This value is probably only extropolated from ORP measurement and maybe the pH measurement. And frankly, I would not trust it much, as there are more things that come into play than just these things. And frankly I would not trust too much any of the measurements from this device. But it can be useful to see how they change over time to give you idea of some of the things that might be happening. But factor in some of the things mentioned above (and probably a lot more).
@swainstm You are probably right regarding measurement of chlorine with this device as it needs certain level of ORP to show chlorine, although drop tester shows enough chlorine. How do you get higher ORP level?
Hard to say. The one I purchased mostly did not show ORP readings sensible. eg, I lot of the time the ORP was reported as a negative which is not possible. I think in the beginning it showed some readings which might have been believable, but quick deteriated to being completely useless. So maybe that is your issue.
I suspect if you think it might be working, then make sure the pH is right, make sure you don’t have excessive stabiliser, make sure the other metrics are in sensible ranges with test from a trusted pool shop. And if this is all good, and you have sensible levels of Chlorine tested independantly, and ORP is still showing zero or very low numbers, then the ORP reader is probably faulty.
in fact I think that the ORP measurement is wrong, with or without stabilizer (30ppm max) I measure between 200 and 300mV despite a good presence of chlorine so it is impossible to display the correct measurement for free chlorine. Fortunately I have 3 important pieces of information which come back correctly, temperature, salt and pH.
Has anyone tried the upgraded version of this device? It’s listed as the YY-1099/1099L model. According to the seller, it offers several improvements over the previous version, including better corrosion resistance and an IP68 rating. I’d be interested to hear your experience—especially whether it works reliably with Zigbee2MQTT (Z2M).
I have one on the way. But I am going to use ZHA.
And does this new model work in ZHA?
I do not have it in my hands yet.
I’ve got one on the way as well!