Rain/Solar ZigBee Sensor not working as expected... loosing connection

Hardware
1

Hi,

I have added Zigbee to my HA installation lately.

I am using a (aquara) magnet door sensor and a (Tuya) rain/solar sensor.

While the door-sensor is simply working, without any problems the rain sensor is acting up.

Installation of the rain sensor was simple, but I got a signal “rain” (dry/wet") and one sensor “open/close”. The “solar” sensor is not important to me, so i don’t care too much. The open/close signal does not seem to show any indication of charging or not.
The battery status is also reported, and it seems to be well charging.

I simply wanted to to check if it is raining in my open window.

This is the sensor I have bought:
https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005007504583342.html
image_2024-08-20_171340598

The problem is, that the sensor looses connection evey few days and is unresponsive then. The only way to get it back up in the network is with re-binding.

I have already changed the physical location. It is now about 3-4m away from the ZigBee hub. The other door-sensor is about 7-8meters away and working just flawless.

Is there anything I can do to improve this, or is the sensor-hardware simply defect?

The nice thing on this sensor is that it does not need to change batteries, as it is solar powered.
But a sensor that is not working reliably is also not acceptable…

I would appreciate any Ideas on that!

Thanks

2

Hi, do you have other zigbee devices and do those work fine?

You might have a look at this extensive post about zigbee, it’s from one of our community members and can be very useful: Zigbee networks: how to guide for avoiding interference + optimize using Zigbee Router devices (repeaters/extenders) to get a stable mesh network with best possible range and coverage

3

yes, the magnet-door-sensor is Zigbee and working flawless.

Thanks for the link, I’ll investigate…

4

Do you get a battery level sensor and did you check that it has enough power to keep the sensor connected?

5

How did you connect it ? Tuya hub, ZHA, Zigbee2MQTT ?

6

Hi,

the sensor has plenty of battery power. once connected it never indicated below 90%.

The sensor is connected via ZHA.

7

Updates…

I think I got the issue halfway solved!

I have found this site here, discussing the sensor.

It has a link to this discussion/issue on GitHub.

I had to install a ZHA quirk (i didn’t know what that is), but it seems to work.

With that I was able to get a (up to now) stable sensor data.

wish me luck that it keeps working