I’m looking for a lux and motion sensor in my garage which can hit maybe -10c (14f) in the garage in the winter.
Basically just want to say when lux is below a value and it sees motion turn on a z wave light switch. Then after no motion for preset time turn off light.
I’m looking for the fastest and most reliable.
From all the reading I’ve done and videos I’m watch I’ve narrowed it down to the Fibaro eye, aeotech multisenor, aeotech tri sensor or zooz 4 in 1.
If there’s a huge performance/reliability increase I would usb power it if needed. But would rather not if I don’t have to.
All the reviews and comparisons I found are pretty old like 2-3 years and was hoping for something a bit more recent with newer hardware (not sure if they’ve upgraded internals or firmware in the last year of so).
Has anyone done side my side comparisons of any two (or more) of the above to see how accurate the lux sensors are and how responsive the motions sensors are?
Is there a reason you're only looking at Z-wave? Zigbee sensors will always smoke Z-wave ones on speed. The Phillips Hue Outdoor Motion Sensor nails all your requirements if Zigbee is acceptable. It's good down to -20C.
Of the Z-Wave sensors, the Fibaro and Zooz are probably your best bets, but if you have a C-7 hub, I believe both will join automatically with S0 security, and will cause you trouble if you don't have a secondary controller that can be used to join them without security. From what I understand, the the Aeotec Multi is not great on Hubitat, and it's pretty slow.
I've used the Fibaro, Aeon Multi 6, and Zooz 4-in-1. (Never used the Aeon Trisensor, but I imagine it's similar to the Multi.) Honestly, I wouldn't be too scared of a review from two years ago. As long as it's reviewing the v2 Zooz 4-in-1 (easy way to tell: the new one takes a CR123A battery instead of two household alkalines--and it's much faster to respond), then I don't think any of those have had a hardware change. The Fibaro also had a "classic" Z-Wave version that looks similar, but as long as you have the Plus version, that's current. The Aeon Mutli has at least one firmware update in its history, but I don't know that it changed anything significant. Others may have too.
Anyway, my opinion: the Zooz is the fastest to detect motion, but as mentioned above, most Z-Wave sensors pale in comparison to Zigbee sensors here. The Aeon was terribly slow for indoor motion automation. I never used the Fibaro for this purpose but looking at when the LED blinks makes me think it would be too (but the slightly similar and apparently discontinued Dome motion sensor wasn't too slow). For lux, however, the Zooz 4-in-1 is nearly unusable. It caps out at 50 or so lux, and to make things worse, the Hubitat driver scales it to lux in that range from the sensor's internal arbitrary 0-100 reporting range (so you lose precision for the cost of getting standard units). This is really only useful for seeing whether it's light or dark outside but not much in between. Not totally unusable, but probably even less usable than most sensors if you have it indoors (which itself can be problematic given that turning lights on or off also affects readings). The Fibaro and Aeon both provide a wide usable range of readings.
My only other issue is that the Aeon ate batteries and I eventually moved it to us power to avoid that. This could have been something with my configuration, but I thought all of my reporting was set to reasonable intervals. I haven't had that problem with any others I've used, though if you do want USB power, the Aeon is the only one with that option built-in. (Inovelli's 4-in-1 sensor also works well for me, but they probably won't have that back in stock before next spring. Looks a bit like the two Aeon sensors.)
I did read somewhere that Zigbee was faster but none of the "best motion sensor" article or videos showed any zigbee sensors. They all seemed to show Zooz, Aeotech or Fibaro.
Would the Phillips Hue sensor not be going through the Hue bridge?
I thought that would be slower going through a hue hub and then my network and then to the C-7 rather than having a Z-Wave sensor directly connect to C-7.
Ah, you're right about the Zooz, I do remember a review saying the lux scale is strange. Thanks for mentioning that! I think that probably will take it out of the running then. It may or may not work for this specific application but I don't want something with that limitation as it may be an issue in the future and it's nice to standardize on a sensor for other applications and don't want that lux scale to be an issue.
I forgot to mention: I have a Hue sensor, too. Mine is just paired with my Hue Bridge network, mostly for testing, but it also has a wide range of reportable lux values. I haven't used it directly paired to Hubitat can't exactly compare speed, but every Zigbee sensor I've used has been faster than any Zigbee sensor, so I can't imagine this would be any different.
Speaking of that (and answering your other question), the Hue motion sensor would work best paired directly to Hubitat. Then, it's just a regular Zigbee device. The Hue/Hubitat integration is pretty fast for sending commands (I have some Z-Wave switches sending scene/button events to Hubitat, then Hubitat sending LAN commands to the Hue Bridge, with the Hue Bridge sending those things to the bulbs via its own Zigbee, and it's still lightning-fast). But the Hue API doesn't provide a way to immediately "push" changes to third-party integrations like Hubitat, so things like motion sensors would be a particularly poor choice to use via that route. Hubitat's built-in integration doesn't even support them. I wrote a custom integration that now does, but I still don't recommend using them for time-sensitive motion automations (like motion lighting) for that reason--things going in the other direction rely on polling to get current states.
Zigbee motion sensors tend to do less than Z-Wave ones do - most of them only do motion and temp, and it's very uncommon for Zigbee sensors to have things like sensitivity or field of view adjustments. Regardless, the slowest zigbee sensor is faster than the fastest Z-wave sensor, so for motion lighting, zigbee will almost always be the best choice. I don't know if you will find anyone on this board that would agree that any of the Z-wave sensors on your list are the best, unless they use only Z-wave devices.
Perfect. Thanks so much.
So kind of sounding like the Fibaro is best for z wave (since Zooz has strange lux scale and Aeotech is slow). But I'll take a look at the hue motion sensor too and see if can find any other zigbee ones.
Mine is just paired with my Hue Bridge network, mostly for testing, but it also has a wide range of reportable lux values. I haven't used it directly paired to Hubitat can't exactly compare speed, but every Zigbee sensor I've used has been faster than any Zigbee sensor, so I can't imagine this would be any different.
