I live in an apartment in a block building. I mainly use Z-Wave devices to avoid issues with crowded 2.4GHz bandwidth. I have a garage in the same building, but quite far from my apartment. Hubitat doesn't detect the Zooz ZSE44 sensor placed there. It also doesn't detect the ZAC38 range extender when plugged in. I can't place any additional devices between my apartment and the garage. I'd like to have a temperature + humidity sensor and a garage door status sensor in the garage. In my home, I want a light that shines green when the garage is closed and red when open. It would also be nice to get a phone notification if the garage stays open longer than 5 minutes. What's the best way to solve this?
YoLink is long range.
There is an integration for it.
Maybe another Z-wave sensor-I feel the Ecolink sensors have good range, (I don't think they have a temp/hum sensor), and there is Z-wave Long Range, although it's not a good sign the repeater can't make contact.
In your experimentation, have you thought about the location of the hub-maybe it could be tweaked to maximize distance, eg, put it on an exterior wall.
Second hub in the garage. Using a community developed app called "HubConnect", it is possible to share devices between two hubs that are distant from each other, and even on separate LANs.
Any chance you share some wiring with your garage?
If your garage power is tied to your distribution panel there's a chance a powerline adapter might get your LAN out there.
Then Hub Mesh would work, or you might find some Matter hubs and sensors (Hue/DIRIGERA) you can tie in to your Hubitat hub.
Just mentioned the Yolink Garage Door kit in another thread. You could try it with their hub, but the range of the Yolink hub is not as far as a Yolink Device to Device connection for some reason. I truely do get around 1/4 of a mile range with a D2D connection, and that's also with the sensor inside a nested metal box. Really incredible performance.
Yolink does offer a Temp/Humidity sensor too, and yes there is a Hubitat community integration for it, but there are two things you need to consider.
The range of the hub isn't as good, and a D2D connection is for binary devices only so that work around wouldn't apply for a T/H sensor. You would have to experiment to find out if the Yolink T/H sensor to Yolink hub connection is not too far away for your situation.
Until the Yolink local hub finally hits the market, there's a dependency on the cloud to use any of their currently available hubs.
So for the garage sensor, I would absolutley recommend the Yolink Garage Door Kit, with a Z-Wave or Zigbee sensor physically attached to the relay to get an event in Hubitat. The Ecolink flood sensor should work fine for that, and it already has wires coming out of it. Just cut the probe off and connect the wires to the sensor terminals on the Yolink garage door kit relay.
For the Yolink Temp/Humidity sensor, I would only recommend trying it if you're OK with a cloud connecton for that one sensor in your smart home, and I'd also recommend buying that from Amazon, so if it doesn't work out you have an easy return path.
The light notification is easily accomplished with a compatible color smart bulb. The phone notification part is easily accomplished with the Hubitat Notifier app on the hub and the Hubitat mobile app on your phone.
I have temp sensors out in my yard, about 50+ feet from the house.
You may want to look at using something with more range, like ECOWITT
My gateway came with my weather station, but you can buy just the gateway and the add on devices. There is a community integration for Ecowitt that I use to bring them into Hubitat as devices.
They have very good range, using their own RF channel. You may even want to just buy a weather station that comes with this gateway. I put data from my weather station on my dashboards.
Edit: In case it wasn't clear, the community integration for Ecowitt is all local. You set the hub IP and port in the gateway and it pushes the data locally to the hub.
Ecowitt uses RF wireless signals with up to 300 feet (100 meter) range.
Wow! Thank you all for your responses! I didn't expect such a reaction.
In your experimentation, have you thought about the location of the hub-maybe it could be tweaked to maximize distance, eg, put it on an exterior wall.
I experimented with different hub positions, but without success.
Any chance you share some wiring with your garage?
Unfortunately, there's no chance of that. There might be a connection, but it's shared by 60 apartments.
Some kind of cellular solution?
Second hub in the garage.
I live in Poland and YoLink is poorly available here. I'm afraid that several solid concrete walls might be too much for a direct connection with the hub. YoLink Hub 3 looks great, but it might not work in Poland, and here for $7 I'll have internet for a whole year.
Following this line of thought. Let's say I set up an LTE router in the garage. Then:
Are there sensors that can send signals through the internet to my hub without intermediaries?
If I connected this LTE router through VPN to my home network, it should appear to the sensors as if they were on the internal network. Are there sensors that can send readings via WiFi directly to Hubitat or I will need a second hub?
I assume they are and that you paired them before relocating them. But just in case...
Z-Wave operates on different radio frequencies in different regions.
In Poland, it uses the 868.4 MHz frequency instead of 908Mhz or 916Mhz as in the U.S. Make sure any Z-Wave devices you are using are all on the same frequency. Is Z-Wave LR even a thing in Poland?
If all the above checks out, A thought occurred to me to build a passive repeater. Passive in that they do not have an amplifier and so do not require any power. They are back to back antennas connected together with a high quality feed line. One antenna is inside and the other outside the garage hopefully where it has near line of sight or better to your dwelling.
I assume they are and that you paired them before relocating them.
Thanks for the hint. That's exactly what I did. I was even able to get a connection between the garage and the apartment by plugging the repeater into an outlet in the public hallway, but the repeater can't stay there.
Is Z-Wave LR even a thing in Poland?
I can't find any confirmation for any LR devices available in Europe yet It looks like it's still a work in progress.
A thought occurred to me to build a passive repeater.
That's an interesting thought, but after a small search, I can see it rarely works. It looks to me, it's very hard to make it properly.
This is a good idea for the temp/humidity sensor. @Zbysia, since you're in Poland, you might look at the Misol sensors. They are supported via a community Ecowitt integration. I have one of the 433 Mhz gateways and 3 of their soil moisture sensors. No problem with signal when the gateway is in my garage, and one of the sensors is below grade at the back of my property. There's quite a lot between the two that would block the signal of a Z-Wave, Zigbee or WiFi device, but the low 433 MHz signal penetrats building materials very well.
For the contact sensor, you might also find sucess with 433 Mhz, but that will require a bit of investigation to find the right choice. There are 433 MHz contact sensors on Aliexpress that come with a relay. You could potentially connect the contact points of a Zigbee or Zwave contact sensor to the output of the relay. Similar to what I did with the Yolink relay. However, I would be very careful doing that with the inexpensive 433 MHz relays that come paired with the 433 MHz contact sensors. A quick search showed there are many sellers, but they all seem to have a mains voltage input. Given the price of these, it's probable that the contacts are not isolated "dry" contacts. So if you cannot find a 433 MHz contact sensor and relay pair that includes a low voltage DC powered relay, then you might need to get more creative. You could do something like attach a standard relay to the output of the 433 MHz relay, so that you are assured you have "dry" unpowered contact points to close the Zigbee or Z-Wave contact for input to Hubitat.
Both require that you flash the Sonoff bridge with Tasmota, so there's that extra layer of complication. Not to mention that you would need to add HA if you don't already have it. Knowing what I know about how many additional devices and integration opportunities that opens up when you add HA and Home Assistant Device Bridge to Hubitat, that's a no brainer. However not everyone is keen on adding another smart home platform, regardless of what opportunities it can unlock for them.
If you can get wifi out there, your options open up a lot. As @ranchitat said, you can do this with PowerLine, or maybe even with a TP-Link wifi extender.
Besides EcoWitt sensors, I use wifi switches in my shed because wifi reaches there, You can connect wifi devices to Hubitat with the Alexa Skill for the device, via the Hubitat Alexa skill, using a virtual device to trigger a routine in Alexa, using Alexa as the middleman. Or do the whole Tuya integration path with a developer account, but that is probably overkill.
Sounds like there’s no place feasible in between that isn’t public space. Although there are directional WiFi antennas, so WiFi is a good suggestion too. You can also make a directional WiFi antenna fairly cheaply.
I decided to provide WiFi to the garage. Today I ordered a used MikroTik Routers and Wireless - Products: wAP LTE kit for $35. It should arrive in 2 days. I enabled the OpenVPN server on my home router (checked, it works). The Mikrotik router has a VPN client, so all devices in the garage should think they're in my home network along with Hubitat.
Now I don't know what to do next.
I searched for sensors that work over WiFi, but I couldn't find anything compatible with Hubitat. What options do I have now, assuming I can connect devices to the same network as Hubitat, but only through WiFi? Some additional hub/gateway? Or are there devices that work over WiFi?
How about putting another Hubitat hub in there?
Connect that hub via WiFi, and then mesh that hub and the one in your apartment?
Then you could use any kind of Zigbee or Z-wave device that can connect to a Hubitat.
I still can't believe you pay $7/mo for internet access, lol.
edit: You have to make sure which hub supports WiFi. I don't know when that started. C8 has it, I know.
edit2: Even if not Hubitat, you could also put in a cheap WiFi camers.
It's $7 per year and I have 720GB "limit" for mobile which I plan to use for connection in Garage. At home I use fiber optics with 1Gb down/300mb up for $11/mo.
I can connect via ethernet port if needed. I hoped there is some other cheaper way than $220 Hubitat C-8. I might be able to buy used $75 Hubitat C-7. Are there any other options?
It looks like it's still a work in progress.
At home I use fiber optics with 1Gb down/300mb up for $11/mo.
