Customer
Works with Home Assistant
I bought this over other sensors because I needed zwave capable temp, humidity, and motion sensors - and powered, preferably usb powered. This was literally the only thing out there that checked all the boxes without buying separate sensors, but it’s absurdly expensive.
I understand it has extra sensors but who in the world uses lux and uv in home automation… I feel like that’s something you’ll play with out of curiosity and fall back to motion and/or time based automation. It works decently and does what I need, although I'm not happy that it only pushes hourly temperature and humidity updates. Realistically, this should be half the cost for the quality and default abilities of this product.
Pros:
- contains all the basic sensors you need for home automation and then some
- USB powered, set it up and forget about it. No changing batteries.
- comes with two batteries you can use for some of your other home automation devices :)
Cons:
- Feels cheap and fragile. I didn’t expect that for $70 tech. I seriously thought I was going to break it while installing it, the plastic is so thin and feels like it’s going to snap if I grasp it too hard.
- Update frequency not great. I have this on USB power, never used batteries at all, so this should be on a fairly aggressive power profile by default, but it only updates temp and humidity hourly.
- Documentation is very lacking. Nothing that covers how the sensor updates work, power profiles (other than mentioning don't switch power sources), If update polling settings can be changed, nothing says how to do that.
- Tiny. In most cases small form factor would be a plus, but in this case it’s a con. Extremely awkward to install. The base is so tiny that you have to put the screws in first, because if you attach the sensor to the base, you can’t physically get to the screws. Once the base is screwed in place, it’s then almost impossible to screw the back of the unit to the mount because everything is so small. I couldn’t get a grip on the swivel mount properly to tighten it all the way. Hopefully it doesn’t fall down, it’s definitely not as tight as I would like it.
Other thoughts:
- Only pick it up when it goes on sale, it’s ok if you absolutely need usb power and can live with the cons, but not for $70.
- Despite the cheap feeling of this product and all the cons, I would totally buy one for most rooms in the house if this was around $35. I like knowing the temperature and humidity of each room in my house, and I could definitely use motion automation in almost every room. However, given the absurd cost, I can’t justify spending that much to have the motion functionality and the rest of the sensors would mostly go unused. I’ve instead purchased Acurite temperature and humidity sensors for each room , integrated with home assistant, and I’m satisfied with the trade-off cost and functionality (and they give more frequent temp and humidity updates).
