I just received a Zigbee garden moisture sensor – you might be interested – the short video gives more info – there is no branding on this device – but it works – uses a couple of AA batteries – is huge and works with Zigbee2MQTT – that’s a good start… enjoy.
Zigbee Garden Moisture Sensor Quicky
Even tough I have a Zigbee Network I bought the Bluetooth variant in combination with a ESP32 BT Proxy (which I already had). Works absolutely fine. Can’t complain about range issues.
Thanks guys for the feedback. I took the precaution of fitting Energiser Lithium (non-rechargeable) batteries and now you’ve brought this to my attention I notice the device was responding as expected this morning. It seems that Zigbee2MQTT is claiming it can take up to 24 hours for the device to report battery status.. but it does report both battery percentage and “state” – sadly not voltage. I note the readings this morning are showing temperature and humididy as I’d expect.. time will tell. If anyone has any better ideas that don’t involve Bluetooth, I’m all ears 🙂
So by 9:15 this morning the sensor (which is sitting outside in a plant pot) was showing 22c, 25% moisture, 100% battery and 141 LQI. I popped out to work on my pool heating and at 9:40 came back in to see: 23c, 26% moisture, 100% battery and 141 LQI. As my watering system waters the plants at around 7am I’m not entirely sure how the moisture went up unless the previous reading was sometime during the night before the watering.
Continual updates throughout this HOT Spanish day. Oh and I did find out that against the odds it rained overnight so that’ll have helped the moisture – hard to believe as the ground is bone-dry and the sun is blasting. Mid-afternoon I’m checking – 27c, 30% moisture, 100% battery, 147 lqi (link quality)
I have one of these and have found it to be well made but unreliable. It seems to have a really hard time getting a signal even though it’s close to several Zigbee repeaters so it’ll go days without successfully reporting, and when it does sometimes succeed the values it reads are questionable. It also chews through batteries a bit faster than I expected too, though it’s not going through batteries so fast that it’s intolerable.
I’d be curious to hear if you have similar issues after having it around for a while.
in theory this is a nice sensor… i have 4 of them.. but they all drain the battery see the github issue for it: https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt/issues/17500#issuecomment-1587631485
…my devices all report their link-status every 41 seconds… and i think because of this the battery lasts no longer then 1-2 months (with alkaline)
…do you also see the battery-drain issue?
I also see more battery drain than I expected, though I get probably around 3-4 months. SmartHomeScene reviewed one a few months ago and discovered that some variants have a firmware issue that causes increased battery drain, I’m guessing I/we may have been sold a bugged one.
Well, if the battery starts to look like it’s not going to last – it’s going back to AliExpress with a severe complaint. Again time will tell.