I am a HA newbee and looking for a temperature sensors for inside the garage / basement etc. What is an affordable sensor I should get?
I would look into this one now that there are more updates to it for what it can do:
Wired power + Temp Sensor + Zoned Presence sensor
1 Like
Do you want zigbee, zwave, wifi or (
) Bluetooth?
First, decide which protocol you want to use. Is there a good WiFi signal in the garage? There are lots of cheap temperature sensors on line. But unfortunately few of them work locally. They usually want to work only through the vendor’s “cloud” servers. That should be a hard “no” for any HA implementation.
Do you have Zigbee or Z-Wave set up in HA? If so, that becomes easy. Again, lots of choices on line. If not, you should be considering buying a Zigbee coordinator (or whatever it’s called in Z-Wave) for your HA server. If your garage is far away from the device running HA, buy a couple of smart plugs to stick in between and they’ll automatically build a robust mesh network to cover your garage, and wherever else you need a device.
I have good wifi in my garage / workshop. Most of the found devices are the Philips Hue lamps, reolink cameras and stuff like apple TV’s etc. My alarm system is not found automatically so i have to look into that later. So I guess I haven’t made up my mind about Zigbee or other protocols. Zigbee sounds like a good idea because there is a lot I would like to include like temperature sensors etc.
Right now I haven’t made up my mind yet. For the temperature sensor for the garage / workshop I have good wifi there but thinking ahead and looking at the other things I would like to do it might be a good idea to go for Zigbee I guess.
When going with zigbee make sure you have a decent ratio of devices that can act as mesh points or routers like with smart plugs so that end devices and properly find routes back to the coordinator you choose.
The device I linked earlier is wifi based as such as long as as you stated you have good signal strength for your wifi in the home it will fill that role and since its usb powered you don’t need to worry about replacing batteries since wifi and bt based devices eat up batteries like there is no tomorrow in some cases.
Thanks Robert, I haven’t made up my mind yet but it looks like I will have to pick one sometimes in the near future. Right now I’m still learning about integrations and Entities and automating scenes. There is also some stuff that has not been found by HA like my alarm system. The reason for looking at Zigbee for me is purely on the basis of the availability of affordable sensors.
Wifi+Zigbee+Matter over Wifi is imo the best combination to go with for ease of setup and use for the vast majority.
You can then add in z-wave and lorawan for more case specific devices not available in other protocols when you need them.
Generally if it has an integration it will work out of the box in HA and with zigbee devices if its not already supported at the time by ZHA or Z2MQTT then its just waiting for a quirk to be coded up after its been released and folks have had the time to play with them.
For everything else most folks go the ESP route with custom solutions to devices that don’t have HA support out of the box or can’t be flashed to have support directly, this may be the route you may need to go when it comes to the alarm system you have that you want to tie into HA for control via Alarmo.
i.e
