here are some that I got recently. they work perfectly for me.
Lately my sensors haven’t been reliable
What do you mean by this are they taking ages to respond or becoming unavailable in HA?
I have been using these sensors for 9 months now and to stop them becoming unavailable I needed to get a second gateway as I was exceeding the device limit on the first, and I also moved to run a second instance to avoid delays in automation firing.
Everything in the xiaomi hub becomes unavailable in home assistant. The gateway light doesn’t work either. If you load mi home in the phone everything is working and responsive.
To fix i have to restart home assistant. This happens about everyday.
The zigbee frequency and the WiFi 2.4ghz frequency are well seperated. There appears to be no interference from other 2.4ghz devices.
I have 20 xiaomi zigbee devices (incl 4 power points). I also have vacuum, 2x Philips Xiaomi bulbs, 1x yeelight bulb, 1x air purifier connected to the hub. The hub is not blocked from internet and everything is in the same network. I have a unifi AP providing WiFi to the gateway and my rasp pi is on a unifi switch using Ethernet connection.
This same style of sensor is available for ~$17 usd from quite a few sources now. I have one of the dome branded sensors that shares this hardware and it works great.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong I’m pretty sure the device limit only applies to the zigbee sensors think it’s around 30 odd. Symptoms of this were just one or two sensors would become unavailable in both ha and mi home. It sounds more like connection back via wifi the gateways have a poor wireless antenna design with little gain so they can’t be too far from your unifi. Can you login and see what your rssi is for your gateway?
Good day, I’m sure some may already know about rf sensors, but want to share my experience. I initially used zwave and still have a couple around. These were close to 50GBP a piece! From the start it was always problematic; adding them to network, removing them, heal, etc, etc, etc and I know from the various threads that this is just the way it is with this protocol.
Looking for alternatives I stumbled onto this gateway project.
For the ones that aren’t keen on welding and building modules, the easiest implementation is to buy a Sonoff RF bridge USD14 for the gateway https://www.itead.cc/smart-home/sonoff-rf-bridge-433.html
and flash it. Dr Zz has a video on it.
With this gateway you can manage door sensors, pirs, smoke alarms, flood alarms, etc. Decent door or pirs will cost 6 to 8 usd each.
The thing is, it just works! once set up no more hassle or config errors or any of these recurring stories. So for the price of one zwave sensor (50GBP) you can set up (in my case) 2 gateways to ensue coverage, and still have almost 40usd to buy at least 6 sensors.
For those familiar with tasmotta, you can also use the tasmota sketch to control the gateway in the same manner.
If anyone is interested and I may offer more details, feel free to ask.
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that’s what i wondered too.
Gateway: RSSI 92% (-61dBm)
I’ve also tried moving it to a different location, so I will see how that goes.
This is on my (ever growing) list of things to do.
Since the new DrZzz video this week it has gone higher up the list (his original video on it made the setup process look a bit flaky)…
I’d be interested in more details, particularly what sensors you use. Your mix of quoting USD and GBP doesn’t make it clear if you are in the UK or US 
.
And an easy question to start with, how long do the batteries last?
These devices can not be connected to the hub, these are Wifi devices.
That signal strength is pretty good, I would be interested to know if you can ping the Xiaomi Gateway when you experience the all devices unavailable and can ping others this will tell us if there is an issue with the Gateway connection to your network or the wireless network itself. I know UBNT have issues with large numbers of connected clients they tend to just throw clients off randomly as the cup gets to full.
Only have about 12 devices or less on the WiFi.
The problem is that home assistant doesn’t recovery from a network issue or gateway issue so if i ping the gateway after stuff goes unavailable then it’s fine art that point in time.
My suggestion is to go with the Tasmotta sketch. Connect the 4 pins to the board and flash. Not much to it.
Im using these Pirs.
Very good quality, hard plastic good range. Been running on same battery 9 months now.
I use this door/window sensors.
They provide on and off signal. Same battery length thus far.
Im in Dubai, so I get a mix of bits from UK, US and China. 
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I have just bought some WiFi door / window sensors off eBay for £9.10 each.
Search for NAS-DS01W although I don’t know what they are like yet.
They also do a PIR motion sensor called NAS-PD01W
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I recently bought these:
They are not too laggy (1-2 seconds) in a 90 sqm flat. The caveat is that it’s only pollable thru TuyaSmart App and HA’s internal Tuya component currently doesn’t support this device but it’s expected to be in the near future.
One possible way around this would be trying to flash tasmota or some other variant since the board has contact points:
But I’m too noob to even know where to start.
I typed NAS-PD01W and I get these motion sensors. They look really good and specially like the size.
work with Tuya, so If they get integrated into HA, this is the way forward. (wifi/mqtt)
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Sorry I meant to paste NAS-DS01W
@vermis has linked to the same item.
I was looking at the motion sensors as well, look good!
When I get them I will document which pads are needed to flash tasmota
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Oh I didn’t realie we were talking about the same product 
I hope you get them soon and can share a succesful flashing story.
Dr ZZZ has an excellent video on how to use magnetic switches along with Sonoff RF Bridge and Tasmota.
The sensors are about US5 or less.
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I just ordered 2 sensors and they are less than US3 here.
I have got 11 out of my 12 sensors delivered today.
So over the next day / weekend I will look into which of the test points are the RX and TX so we can re-flash them with Tasmota etc
They are ESP8266 with a flash chip, but don’t know on the size yet, I am guessing they are the standard 1MB? Will update when I know.