Zigbee devices

[JohnBishop]

Hi All,

  I hope you are doing well.
I am looking into Zigbee to do some monitoring (temperature, smoke, temp/humidity, motion sensors) and simple automation lighting in the house. Rather than bulbs (I don't want LED light) I would control lamps with a motion sensor + a Zigbee plug.
As you are aware there is tons of vendors.

The priority is to deploy a controller (RPi + Sonoff Dongle-E) with MQQT and then a number of temp + smoke alarms, CO alarm.

I would prefer to monitor the temperature rather than smoke what I believe gives me the earliest warning. Smoke in the house can be extinguished but in the wooden shed or a wooden garden office it's probably already too late. Please correct me if I am wrong.
The automation is less of a priority. This will be added later.

I have seen some Heiman, Xiaomi, Shelly, Frient, Aqara sensors. I would even prefer to mix them as if I stick to a single vendor I can be fooled e.g. one man bought a Frient smoke/temp sensor, it looked like it's working but it wasn't (was faulty). If you mix then less probability they are all end up faulty.
What would you recommend?

[JohnMo]

Are north or south of the Scottish border? Scotland although not independent has completely different rules for smoke and heat detectors

[JohnBishop]

4 minutes ago, JohnMo said:

Are north or south of the Scottish border? Scotland although not independent has completely different rules for smoke and heat detectors

I am in Midlands, England.

[JohnBishop]

so I reckon the smoke detectors coming from China are not certified
is this what you are trying to say?

[Mr Punter]

I got some Zigbee temperature / humidity / monitors and a hub a while ago.  You only have interface via their app and I could not work out how to store the data locally.  The stuff began to fail and was more of a pain than it was worth, so it is consigned to the "drawer of crap" in the filing cabinet, together with some SONOS stuff that was Emperor's New Clothes a few years ago, but turned out to be his grubby jockstraps.

 

I may be mistaken, and the stuff is actually magic. 

[Super_Paulie]

got quite a few Sonoff relays, all work fine but i guess a risk of burning your house down id imagine. 

[JohnBishop]

2 minutes ago, Super_Paulie said:

got quite a few Sonoff relays, all work fine but i guess a risk of burning your house down id imagine. 

yes, this is what I was considering in the Tuya, Heiman and MOES smoke detectors and some Sonoff Zigbee devices.

[NailBiter]

On 01/05/2024 at 14:06, JohnBishop said:

I don't want LED light

Why don't you want LED light?

Edited May 6 by NailBiter

[Wil]

I've got a decent mix of Shelly, Zigbee and various Tuya sensors spread through the house. Don't do any smoke monitoring (not sure I'd trust anything wifi based for this) but all automation and temp monitoring in rooms.

 

Small zigbee temp and heat sensors paired with the excellent zigbee mmWave motion sensors and a smattering of zigbee plugs. The plugs and mmWave sensors act as repeaters too which makes the whole network more stable. Have a zigbee 30A switch for my immersion and another on the car charger too.

 

I run it all through HomeAssistant having moved on from Homey a year or so ago. I haven't spent a lot of time making it pretty but it works for at-a-glance monitoring. 

 

Some of the zigbee sensors occasionally need reset and power outages of the repeaters causes chaos but all good otherwise.

 

 

[JohnBishop]

On 06/05/2024 at 12:19, NailBiter said:

Why don't you want LED light?

I just don't like the colour (too blue) and low frequency of this light.

Edited May 10 by JohnBishop

[Sparrowhawk]

Hi @JohnBishop, for temperature and humidity I've tried Sonoff, Aqara and Tuya.

 

Avoid Sonoff, the one I had was more out of calibration than the others and dropped off the network more despite being closest to the dongle.

 

My Aqara ones are excellent (this model) and give the finest resolution data. However they are more expensive than...

 

Tuya, which is what most of my sensors now are because they were less than £3.50 each. Beware there are two models on AliExpress, IH-K009 and ZG-227Z. IH-K009 are slightly more expensive and have performed better, but I have no idea what the difference between them is.

 

Zigbee range is surprisingly short (well it was a surprise to me) if you have more than plasterboard and timber walls in your house. I've ended up with a second Sonoff dongle in repeater mode 8m from the other to keep sensors in all rooms connected to the network.

 

For plugs, I went with these WiFi ones preflashed with Tasmota (Esphome wasn't an option at the time). I currently have a temperature sensor and a WiFi plug automatically controlling my heated propagator.

[TerryE]

@JohnBishop, I personally avoid using any which depend on vendor supplied apps. As @Wil suggests have a look at HomeAssistant.  It runs fine on an RPi4 with a min 2Gb.  Use USB3-attached SSD as your main storage device.  HomeAssistant has a load of "one-click" add-ons and integrations, such as the Mosquitto MQTT Broker, MySQL, Zigbee2MQTT, ESPHome, Tuya, Tasmota, and these take away most of the configuration pain.

 

I have a load of Zigbee sensors.  All of my smart switches use Tasmota. I also have some custom Wemos D1 mini Pro set-ups to handle my DS18B20 temperature sensors and these run ESPHome.  Everything is integrated through MQTT and all runs on my LAN.  I buy everything on AliExpress and wait the extra 2-3 weeks to arrive.

 

OK, I don't use RPis anymore as all my services run as x86-64 VMs / containers on an old laptop that I use as a server and this runs ProxMox host, but that my personal preference because I am an IT geek.  A single RPi running HassOS will work fine for most users.

[Pocster]

You want home assistant . Turn off all cloud crap ( avoid Tuya ) .

Maybe Shelly if WiFi good . Wouldn’t want smoke alarm dependent on WiFi or zigbee . 
AliExpress zigbee stuff is a gamble . Some works as expected , some doesn’t and some you end up doing your own code work around or requesting on GitHub for proper support .

China land isn’t that keen to follow zigbee spec …. Z wave though is certified so ( in theory ) more chance of working as expected .

It’s all a bit disconnected and hobbyist . But with time and learning you can get something decent .

Edited May 10 by Pocster

[JohnBishop]

3 hours ago, TerryE said:

@JohnBishop, I personally avoid using any which depend on vendor supplied apps. As @Wil suggests have a look at HomeAssistant.  It runs fine on an RPi4 with a min 2Gb.  Use USB3-attached SSD as your main storage device.  HomeAssistant has a load of "one-click" add-ons and integrations, such as the Mosquitto MQTT Broker, MySQL, Zigbee2MQTT, ESPHome, Tuya, Tasmota, and these take away most of the configuration pain.

 

I have a load of Zigbee sensors.  All of my smart switches use Tasmota. I also have some custom Wemos D1 mini Pro set-ups to handle my DS18B20 temperature sensors and these run ESPHome.  Everything is integrated through MQTT and all runs on my LAN.  I buy everything on AliExpress and wait the extra 2-3 weeks to arrive.

 

OK, I don't use RPis anymore as all my services run as x86-64 VMs / containers on an old laptop that I use as a server and this runs ProxMox host, but that my personal preference because I am an IT geek.  A single RPi running HassOS will work fine for most users.

I have RPi ready with HomeAssistant but believe it or not I misplaced my RPi USB-C charger so I have to wait couple of days to get a replacement.
What is this Tasmota about? I keep hearing about it.

[JohnBishop]

3 hours ago, Pocster said:

You want home assistant . Turn off all cloud crap ( avoid Tuya ) .

Maybe Shelly if WiFi good . Wouldn’t want smoke alarm dependent on WiFi or zigbee . 
AliExpress zigbee stuff is a gamble . Some works as expected , some doesn’t and some you end up doing your own code work around or requesting on GitHub for proper support .

China land isn’t that keen to follow zigbee spec …. Z wave though is certified so ( in theory ) more chance of working as expected .

It’s all a bit disconnected and hobbyist . But with time and learning you can get something decent .

Sure. I start cheaper then look for some more decent eq.
If not Wifi smoke alarms then what? Are there wired LAN ones?
To overcome this I got 4 smoke alarms of 3 different vendors. If one gives up 2 other should pick it up. You can set it up to notify you if the devices decides to vanish.

Edited May 10 by JohnBishop

[TerryE]

19 hours ago, JohnBishop said:

What is this Tasmota about?

Have a look on YouTube and HA forums for more detail. Most of these IoT devices use an ESP processor to connect to one or more sensors / relays, etc.  Traditionally they would be preloaded with vendor-supplied firmware that would connect back to a vendor-supplied cloud service. 

 

Tasmota and ESPHome are open-source projects to provide a configurable firmware that you can download onto IoT devices so you can use them without depending on some closed-source (usually Chinese) vendor-supplied firmware or having to write your own. Amongst other things these can use MQTT to control the device, and both have Home Assistant integrations so you can do pretty much everything through HA.

 

E.g. Google "AliExpress Athom smart plug Tasmota". I bought 6 for around £60 IIRC and they came in about 2 weeks. 

 

Tasmota and ESPhome connect to your home router using TCP.  The other option is to use ZigBee devices which use the ZigBee protocol and use a ZigBee dongle on your RPi with ZigBee2MQTT so that you can also control them using MQTT.

 

Edited May 11 by TerryE

[JohnBishop]

I have deployed my Zigbee devices primarily to control the lighting, temp sensors and smoke alarms and I like it very much.

Now I am in the process of addressing my heating system. I am looking for a Zigbee compatible heating controller that could replace Hive heating + hot water controller.
Would you recommend anything?

[Pocster]

5 minutes ago, JohnBishop said:

I have deployed my Zigbee devices primarily to control the lighting, temp sensors and smoke alarms and I like it very much.

Now I am in the process of addressing my heating system. I am looking for a Zigbee compatible heating controller that could replace Hive heating + hot water controller.
Would you recommend anything?

I simply use a pc with home assistant on Linux . I then use zigbee relays to control actuators on the heating manifold . Do you just want heating on/off ? No zones etc ?

[JohnBishop]

57 minutes ago, Pocster said:

I simply use a pc with home assistant on Linux . I then use zigbee relays to control actuators on the heating manifold . Do you just want heating on/off ? No zones etc ?

Exactly this is what I have in here, Linux with a Zigbee controller.
I think I want to start with heating on/off, scheduling then I look into Zigbee radiator knobs.

[TerryE]

On 13/09/2024 at 14:22, JohnBishop said:

Now I am in the process of addressing my heating system. I am looking for a Zigbee compatible heating controller that could replace Hive heating + hot water controller.  Would you recommend anything?

 

This depends on what you are controlling and what inputs it needs.  You can't make a general choice, as it depends on context.  A lot of this was discussed in my topic

  

with this post summarising my final setup and we are pretty happy with it. In short I have a bunch of contractors in a CU extension next to the main Consumer Unit and these switch power to the HW immersion, slab heater and pump.  These are in turn driven with 24 VDC control signals by an off-the-shelf ESP32 relay board running Tasmota.  The Tasmota firmware is switched by my NodeRED app.

 

I do have a lot of Zigbee sensors but I prefer to use TCP layered stacks such as Tasmota for any switched devices relating to Central  and HW Heating.    

 

[JohnBishop]

4 hours ago, TerryE said:

 

This depends on what you are controlling and what inputs it needs.  You can't make a general choice, as it depends on context.  A lot of this was discussed in my topic

  

with this post summarising my final setup and we are pretty happy with it. In short I have a bunch of contractors in a CU extension next to the main Consumer Unit and these switch power to the HW immersion, slab heater and pump.  These are in turn driven with 24 VDC control signals by an off-the-shelf ESP32 relay board running Tasmota.  The Tasmota firmware is switched by my NodeRED app.

 

I do have a lot of Zigbee sensors but I prefer to use TCP layered stacks such as Tasmota for any switched devices relating to Central  and HW Heating.    

 

I mean I will definitely be looking into replacing my consumer unit with a bigger one and I could look into these fancy devices that go into the consumer unit however considering the fact I am not an electrician or a geek in electronic + the size of the house it's not feasible.
I understand that Zigbee is not fool proof, it can die and the sensors will stop working however if there is a Zigbee alternative to Hive I don't think the downtime of the Home Assistant would affect its functions.
I just want to be able to configure it once and leave it. It would be neat if I could have the activity logged for future reference as part of other Zigbee devices.

What is NodeRED? Is this some competition to Home Assistant? I have seen someone using it in Home Assistant to create automations as flow charts but I don't know how he installed it.

[TerryE]

@JohnBishop, you need to be careful switching 240 VAC stuff especially at high current draw especially if you don't have a grasp of current Building and IEEE regs.  If you do this without Certified Electrician sign-off and have a fire then you could find that your insurance company rejects the claim. 

 

This is my set up.  The CU to right was installed by my sparky.  I added the left-hand extension myself because he couldn't find the time when I needed it installed, but I did this in a way that he'd be happy to sign off.  He's comfortable with the 24VDC / 240VAC spilt as there isn't really a safety issue with the 24VDC side.

 

Node-RED is a Javascript based environment that is well suited to IoT control and comes as a  Home Assistant add-on as well as being able to run standalone.  There are lots of YouTube videos on this.

 

Edited September 15 by TerryE