I put the Ikea Thread sensor in my fridge a while back and it's been a lot more useful than I expected. My fridge had been periodically getting too cold or too hot, I suspect the issue is that the captive touch buttons that control the temp get occasionally bumped, changing the set temperature. With the thread sensor I can have Home Assistant send me an alert when the fridge leaves the safe zone for too long so I can manually correct it.

It's also been interesting to see when placing hot food in the fridge how long the temperature stays elevated for. I put the sensor in a ziplock bag and sucked the air out of it so it has weatherproofing.

One of the things I never see in reports like this is what sensor is being used (is it a Bosch unit? Sensiron? Plain thermistor? Pixies and Fairy Dust? Some bodged together 1wire deal?) and what MCU (Nordic? Espresif? Microchip? Something else?) as those have a huge bearing on what the sensor is actually capable of, and would say a lot about precision/accuracy and battery life.

Do _not_ get the Aqara ones. The things will not stay connected for shit.

I have a couple of the Tuya ones and I'm pleased with them. The humidity accuracy is questionable, but it's fine.

I also have an airgradient (not zigbee, uses wifi) for high accuracy the one place I care about that. Works great in Home Assistant with esphome.

• nijave

  today at 12:49 AM

  Hmm interesting I have 4-5 of them and quite like them. They've all stayed connected over a year except 1 which I just replaced the battery in and I think that fixed it. It was reporting 40% battery but would drop off shortly after connecting.

  Aqara might be the ones with a crappy ZigBee implementation that doesn't roam right so if you move them or your topology changes, they'll drop off.

• cmckn

  today at 12:09 AM

  > Do _not_ get the Aqara ones. The things will not stay connected for shit.

  +1, complete waste of time and money. I thought my Zigbee network or HA was the problem, but the sensors are just garbage.

  • parineum

    today at 12:25 AM

    It's a known issue with them that they don't ever change their routing. If you connect them in a different place than you use them, you're going to have suboptimal to unusable routes.

Hah. I did something similar a while ago, but I also did full saturated salt solution humidity calibration. It's very simple to do: get several different salts, create a saturated solution in a sealed container, and observe the humidity there.

The best sensor in my tests was CentraLite 3310-G. It was the only one actually precise to 1% of RH and 0.1C They are also pretty robust and long-lasting.

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