Home/Garden Temperature sensors - any advice?

[ramblo93]

I"m looking to get a few (5 or so) temperature sensors to dot around the house/garden (Including off grid greenhouse down the bottom of the garden so quite a way form the house).

A quick google seems to show Zigbee sensors synced up to a Home Assistant hub may be the way to go. I like the fact it continually logs the data and you can review on a webpage/phone etc. Is this maybe over engineering a solution?

Any tips/suggestions?

Ideally want something with good range on the sensors. ANy standalone options that wont lead me down a Home Assistant hole?

[mikef]

I do that with 8 Sensorpush weatherproof sensors, and two Sensorpush gateways that lInk to the internet. Works brilliantly for my purpose, with history in the cloud and high/low temperature alerts

The downside is that the US-made sensors have more than doubled in price recently, from £39 a pop to over a hundred

[Frik]

How far is the distance? I've got half a dozen Xiaomi BLE temp and humidity sensors in HA and it's a great and reasonanly simple and cheap solution. I'm running it on a Raspberry Pi, though they're a bit difficult to get hold of at the moment.

The Bluetooth range is okay, but not quite as good on the furthest sensors. Nothing an ESPHome Bluetooth proxy couldn't fix though.

[ramblo93]

Distance to the greenhouse from the house is around 50m...

[mikef]

Is there power down there? And internet, maybe an outdoor antenna? It seems you face two problems: short bluetooth range from devices and getting the results to the cloud. I use the SensorPush gateway 100m from the house, but have both mains and ethernet run to the bottom of the garden

[ramblo93]

No power out there or ifi signal however I am toying with putting out outdoor wifi access point on the side of the house as I have a separate garden room with patchy wifi i want to boost the signal for.

[Trustmeimadoctor]

Don't use WiFi sensors imho they chew through betteries ZigBee or ble but both won't do 50m without repeating the signal

[FlossyThePig]

A bit off the wall, have a search for LoRaWAN.

[sgrimshaw]

Been very pleased with this, in addition to the display once you've set up the weather account you can access via browser or app from anywhere

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B099255R6C/ref...

Add more sensors as required.

[ARHarh]

LoRaWAN is what you need if you want wireless over that sort of distance to be reliable. Otherwise anything zigbee will be fine and does not need to run on home assistant it can run on hubs but I have no idea on how or if they record historic data. Unless you are a tinkerer or willing to put some time into setting it up Home assistant will not be for you, If you are willing to spend time setting up and maintaining the home assistant will be by far the most powerful.

[mikef]

OP, do you want network/cloud connectivity to monitor all temperature/humidity readings in real time (and receive low/high temperature alerts) or just to have an accessible history somewhere ?

It’s the former requirement which is leading to discussions of network range etc which hasn’t delivered an obvious solution as far as I can see

If the real-time requirement is not important, then the SensorPush devices (and probably several others mentioned here) can store a history of readings on the device for 20 days and they download automatically to your phone when you come within Bluetooth range

[theboss]

It might be overkill as more of an industrial offering but I use one of these to monitor my piano (both the ambient room conditions and a separate T/RH probe sitting under the soundboard) and its been excellent

https://www.ubibot.com/ubibot-gs1/

They do smaller / cheaper ones

For the greenhouse they have specific soil temp/moisture probes and describe commercial horticultural use cases. There's also a range of connectivity options from a SIM card / cellular modem to Wifi and Ethernet.