I have a metal outbuilding I would like to put a temperature monitor in that is to far away for zwave or zigbee. But I do have a very extensive Wifi network that covers it. It seems like everywhere I look I see zigbee and z-wave suggested hardware - but almost no wifi options. Do they exist? I thought about getting a new hub, installing it in the outbuilding just so that I could use the 10 Million z-wave and zigbee options on there... of course I would just set the hubs up in a mesh and share over the data... but that seems kind of ridiculous just to a simple temperature sensor no?
I've also seen some suggestions on installing zigbee or z-wave repeaters ... but again - after I spend tons of time experimenting with placement and different models - I would probably still wonder if there was not a more obvious wifi (TCP/IP) solution out there?
Maybe a system like Netatmo which does have custom drivers for HE. The modules of that communicate directly with their proprietory base station (itself a temperature etc monitor) by some radio frequency and the base station communicates to your wifi network
WiFi is a power-hungry wireless protocol, more so than z-wave, zigbee and other RF protocols that are commonly used in battery powered devices.
So while battery powered WiFi temperature monitors might exist, they’re much less common, as you’ve already surmised.
I second the suggestion of an Ecowitt gateway with wireless temperature monitor. That would be much cheaper than setting up a new Hubitat hub and then sharing via hub mesh.
I’ll just clarify that Ecowitt’s servers have nothing to do with local indoor or outdoor sensors reporting back to the gateway device and its integration with Hubitat.
I have never setup any connection to their servers. That’s only needed if you want to upload your weather data to view with their trends/graphs that they make available to users from their website.
I mistakenly bought a bunch of Tuya sensors and didn’t see they were WiFi, not Zigbee..
I’d gladly ship two sensors to you if you pay shipping. Then all you need to get is the $10.00 hub. Total investment less than $20.00 with shipping. I really don’t want these to go to Goodwill because no one will know what they are and they will get tossed.
I have an Ecowitt weather system with a lot of sensors inside and out, including sensors in every fridge and freezer. I am pretty happy with the gear. The sensors have very long range and the batteries last a long time. Even without a Hubitat integration the Ecowitt web site lets you set up some useful alerts, too.
FYI: with an Ecowitt hub you can use sensors from other brands using the same base hardware, such as Ambient Weather. With an Ambient Weather hub though, you are restricted to Ambient Weather hardware.
