Suggestion on wifi devices for remote location

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1

I want to put a couple of sensors in my vacation home. Temp, perhaps occupancy. Plug in or battery, doesn't really matter because if the power goes out so does the internet.

I thought of putting a hub in the home but want to keep wiring to the minimum as my brother in law who I share the house is not technical, often thinks that something is not working, and unplugs everything.

So stand-alone sensors communicating with the cloud (I know verboten in Hubitat land) and then somehow connected to my hubs at home so I can trigger simple rules. This will also have the added bonus of letting me know if the internet is potentially down as the Arris Surfboard modem remarkably doesn't have a remote access feature.

I see a couple of options but thought I would put it to the knowledgeable crowd here for recommendations. Thanks.

2

I'm not aware of any wifi sensors like that that would work with hubitat, but you can use a wireless dongle with Hubitat. That way it works as normal and you don't need to wire hubitat to your network.

3

Given your particular circumstances (ok with cloud etc), you may want to look into the YoLink sensors. They have great range (around 1/4 mile) and incredible battery life (several years) due to their use of YoLink’s version of LoRa. There is a community integration with Hubitat but be aware you will be Cloud dependent. At least something to research for you.

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4

I would still use a hub of sorts so you do not have to rely on wifi battery devices. @tomw could the switchbot hub and devices be linked back to his Hubitat hub remotely? That would be pretty awesome if it could.

5

It can.

6

Wow that's amazing. Can you describe how? Is it special to switchbot or are there other brands that can do it as well?

This would deservevit's own post as I'm sure others would be interested and it would be good reference material for the forum.

7

Why? It's a cloud integration. The location of the actual hub is immaterial. Every cloud integration works the same even. ecobee, etc. or @moh's YoLink suggestion made above yours.

8

I guess I thought it would need to be on the same IP for Hubitat to work with it.

9

No, all of the access is through the internet. As long as Hubitat has internet access and the SwitchBot hub has internet access, it doesn't matter where they are relative to reach other.

(One of the few advantages of a cloud-reliant device).

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10

Oh boy, I've got lots of mischief planned for some of those bots.

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11

Just to be clear, the SwitchBot hub and devices have to be in the same place, but Hubitat can be remote.

12

Yup I bought a bunch of the curtain bots and they all came with a hub. Too many hubs. Going to hide a hub at the gf's and set up some bots.

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13

Thanks for all of the suggestions. It got me thinking - I have a couple of Tuya devices - some unique things like an automated diffuser. There appears to be a driver for their cloud as well so since I have that I will try playing around with it. Also will look into the switchbot as well.