I’m playing around with using an Aeotec multisensor in my bathroom to monitor humidity and turn on and off the bathroom fan as needed when taking a shower. I’m currently trying to use the control I found here.
My problem is that the Aeotec doesn’t seem to report humidity enough. My graph in my app only shows the value every hour, even though I have it set to report every 8 minutes. Is there a better sensor I should purchase?
I have the exact same idea to implement. I was looking at the Zooz ZSE40 sensor as the trigger device. One of the reviews at SmartHome was someone with our exact use case. The only downside is they don’t mention whether they were triggering off humidity or motion. Hopefully someone here has experience with this one re: humidity sensing frequency.
I ordered the Zooz 4 in 1 sensor too and am going to give that a try. People have indicated that it reports more often. The Aeotec works, but you normally have to refresh it manually to get it to activate the fan. It’s set for 8 minutes, but I don’t see anything being reported more than 1 x hour.
The rule I saw indicated they were triggering off humidity.
The Aeotec Multisensor 6 will, by default, report hourly. It can be configured to report more frequently, or to report on threshold changes (e.g. when humidity changes by more than 10%).
However, also by default, when configuring a shorter reporting interval, the device will use a minimum of 60 minutes when it is operating on batteries; if running from USB power it will honour a shorter reporting interval (e.g. 1 minute, 30 seconds, etc.). The device’s technical documentation explains how a four minute reporting interval can be achieved on batteries by changing the device’s wake-up interval, but you need to be aware that these limitations exist for a reason - i.e. maintaining reasonable battery life.
For your use-case, I would suggest exploring the device’s threshold reporting capabilities, rather than attempting to increase the reporting interval. This would allow you to control your fan as required as the humidity rises above a trigger threshold and then falls back below a recovery threshold, without incurring excessive battery consumption from frequent reporting of unimportant (for this use-case) intermediate values, etc.
I use xiaomi humidity sensors. They are a bit of a hassle every time the battery is empty (about once/year) but otherwise work within a couple of seconds; also, they are dirt cheap:
Do I need a custom device handler to enable to ability to change the reporting threshold? Changing it to report at a change of 10% sounds fine.
I can’t seem to find that option? This is all I have:
I was able to find a custom handler that allowed me to set a threshold for reporting. Looks like this sensor might work after all. Thanks @chuckles for pointing me in the right direction. Now I just need to figure out all these settings.
wrong one
