A few days ago, I realized my $5 plastic hygrometer is stuck/broken, and went shopping for a replacement. Down the rabbit-hole!
Short-term, I'd like
either a simple dumb LCD obelisk that sits on the bookshelf and tells me sensor readings, OR a mobile app that does the same.
Long-term, I'd like to be able to forward my data to CWOP/whatever, and bring it into HomeAssistant.
Of course CWOP doesn't need to know my fridge/freezer temperatures (I assume there's a way to choose which channels get sent as what data!) but it seems silly to have two parallel sets of hardware all doing fundamentally the same thing. So I'm looking for a single "family" of hardware that can do:
- At least four soil moisture probes
- Two wired temperature probes, cuz the sensor battery won't appreciate my freezer temperature, nor will the RF get out very well
- Indoor temp/humidity (oh yeah, remember the reason I embarked on this adventure?)
- Outdoor temp/humidity
- Basement water leak detector would be nice but not essential
- Wind/rain/UV, obviously
- Lightning would be neat. There's already a Blitzortung node near me so my own sensor would just be for giggles
Oh yeah, I would like to make 100% sure that all the local functionality still works (mobile app can still see the gateway as long as the phone's on the same wifi, etc) even when the internet is down. Does anyone check for this? Reviews never seem to mention it.
So far, I'm looking at an Ecowitt GW-1000, a WS68/WS80 for meteo stuff, a bunch of WH51's for soil moisture (do they do temperature?), a WH32 for outdoor temp (can it support more than one of these?), a WH55 water leak sensor, and....
nothing in the Ecowitt lineup seems to support fridge/freezer probes.
One option is to chop open a WH31 and move the sensor onto the end of a piece of wire -- I'm entirely too comfortable with a soldering iron -- and tuck that into my fridge, then do a second one for the freezer. The other option is to find some other-branded sensor in the same family, also 915MHz, and hope the GW-1000 can receive it.
I think that's my big question here -- what other-branded probe sensors work with the GW-1000?Or if there's a whole different ecosystem I should be looking at, I'm all ears! Bonus points for being 433MHz instead of 915 -- I actually have rather a lot of 902-928 gear around here (Ricochet, LoRa, HaLow, RFD900, etc) and I have a hunch the sensors aren't smart enough to listen-before-talk. Thankfully temperatures don't change that quickly so I'm not too bothered if the gateway misses 80% of packets, but 99% might be a problem.
