Wanted: Tempurature Sensor & Water/Flood Detector Recommendations

WebThings
#1

Hello all,

I’ve been using WT for quite a while and have a Z-Wave AEOTECH USB and a smattering of ZW devices. I minimally want to monitor internal house temperature (and possibly be able to control heating remotely if it’s not too expensive) and monitor sump pump (water alarm) when were in FL for the winter.

It does not need to be Z-Wave based. Wifi would be ok too. I prefer to not use external servers to view status though.

I’ll search next, but wanted to know if anybody would recommend products that you already have used.

The goal is to obtain alarms based on temp/water rules sent over email and/or text messages… Yesterday, I came home from a week long vacation to find my furnace battery had finally crapped out. Luckily it’s not winter!

Thanks.

#2

I’m afraid this reply may not be very helpful because:

  1. These devices use Zigbee
  2. I’m not sure they are manufactured any more

But I have had good experiences with SmartThings sensors.

The leak sensor is good for detecting floods (https://www.samsung.com/uk/smartthings/sensors-plug-f-wtr-uk-v3/) and many SmartThings devices like the motion sensor and button also contain temperature sensors.

#3

I looked for cheap WiFi solutions but both WiFi and Z-Wave sensors cost $35+. Not tooo unreasonable, but many don’t integrate with IOT applications easily and/or are not locally hosted.

There is a cheap alternative if you have an RPI (which I run my WT instance on). It is a DHT22 sensor that can be connected to a GPIO pin and inspected using any of the numerous Python script examples. I suspect it would not be much of a stretch to push the temp and humidity values to WT virtual devices and Grafana…

There are many examples on the web using cheap RPI Zero devices. One of them is below.

Think I found a Temp/Humidity solution and now need to research leak detection…

#4

AEOTECH make a temp sensor, about CHF/USD 50 which I have not teste, but I have several AQARA (ZigBee) devices that are about CHF/USD 25 each and work well: multi-sensor (temp, humidity, pressure); another one for water leaks; and another one for motion(earthquake), and finally motion detection (proximity). All integrate well with Webthings, although some tweaking was needed.