I am helping a friend set up Home Assistant and they’ve asked me to help with a temperature sensor challenge. They have a well for their water supply and wanted a small wireless temperature sensor to sit on top of the wellhead under the insulation and plastic fake rock. The well is about 80-100ft away from the house. I doubt a Bluetooth sensor could penetrate the insulation and fake rock at that distance. There is no mains power outlet at the wellhead and running one there would be very difficult, so we are looking for a battery-powered wireless solution.
What would be a good wireless sensor for that distance and interference (wellhead insulation)?
With no power at the well, I suspect this isn’t going to be easy. Perhaps an ECOWITT EN30BL, but that’s going to require a GW1100, and I don’t think it has that kind of range.
If you had power at the well, you could power an EPSHome sensor at the well, and all you would need to get out there is a WiFi signal.
@ServiceXp Oooooh!! A wireless sensor with probe!! That would significantly improve the range and reliability by keeping the wireless signal outside of the insulation. Would the device (not probe) be negatively impacted by inclement weather (freezing temps, rain, etc.)? How long do the batteries typically last in those?
Battery powered, with a claimed range of 700ft, and there is a Home Assistant integration. The basic tag is not waterproof, but I have used them successfully in the fridge and freezer, wrapped in a couple of ziploc bags. You will need a tag manager as well (not expensive). Data is stored in the cloud, unfortunately.
I believe they make outdoor sensors as well, but I have not tried one.
@Stiltjack Ahh! Very nice!! The improved expected range should (hopefully) compensate for any insulation interference when placed inside the wellhead housing. The cloud dependency may be an issue, though; he lives in the mountains and his “home internet” is a cellular wifi hotspot.
These are great suggestions! Are there any other options? Keep them coming!!
I have an Aeotec Contact Sensor outdoors monitoring my backyard gate using a reed sensor probe and magnet. I put the sensor in a waterproof box and instead of using the small battery that fits in it, I wired in a much larger battery. The battery level does fluctuate with temperature but it seems to be working fine. Doing so I have extended the time between battery replacements noticeably. Prior to adding the larger battery, it seemed like it was chewing through batteries abnormally fast. Sometimes devices adapt their output power based on distance from next node (I don’t know whether zwave has this ability) but at the very least it may help in instances where the sensor for a reason or another is forced to try to send the same message more than once (does not solve the communication problem but battery life will be longer).
After looking at it a good while, I’ve decided to try out the Ecowitt solution. My reason being:
The probe will allow the temperature to be taken inside the wellhead enclosure while the transmitter can remain outside for better wireless communication
With the transmitter outside of the enclosure, we can view the temperature manually if needed
Lithium AA batteries should handle the cold well and last a long time
The receiver hub has a local integration option to Home Assistant
We can easily add more Ecowitt devices later on and reuse the hub
Once I get things set up, I will (hopefully remember to) come back to this thread and let you know how it went.
Here is an update on the solution. Short answer: The Ecowitt solution worked great!
We were able to set the thermometer probe directly touching the wellhead at the surface, run the probe wire under and out of the exterior cover (fake rock), and mount the transmitter to the outside. We set up the receiver in the house and it worked like a champ!
The only issue was monitoring the probe connectivity. Since the receiver was inside the house and readily available to the WiFi network, it was hard to tell if the transmitter was actually still communicating. Normally, Home Assistant would say if a device was “offline” or not, but Home Assistant couldn’t see or tell if the transmitter was available, only if the receiver was available. We set up an automation to check if the temperature had not changed value at all over a long time (an hour) to determine if the transmitter was still communicating.
Hopefully this will be helpful to someone. Thanks and have a great day!
Further follow-up: I also got the Yolink temperature sensor and hub for even longer distance monitoring (all the way to the chicken coop). I would recommend this option if you need distances longer than the 100 feet I originally needed.