Aeotec TriSensor vs Fibaro Motion Sensor quick mini review (2021)

I was looking for a motion/lux sensor for my garage and after reading tones of reviews and forum posts and watching videos I narrowed it down to the Aeotec TriSensor and Fibaro Motion Sensor because they both appeared to be the fastest Z-Wave motion sensor with Lux.
So I purchased both to test out.

Here’s a quick mini review for anyone looking at these 2 sensors.

Mount:
I really like the Fibaro better than the Aeotec, it’s smaller and more discreet. The mount is a really good idea, doesn’t have the typical screw in wobble post in the back.

Motion Sensing:
The Aeotec seems to be quicker picking up motion. The Aeotec was using a custom DTH (so cloud based) and the Fibaro was using it’s stock local DTH. But even so the TriSensor was still able to beat the Fibaro when turning on 2 lights side by side most of the time. However it was very close. I didn’t play a tone with the advance motion settings, I just left them at default and highest sensitivity. So motion wise they are both very good.

Temp:
The Aeotec seemed more accurate, the Fibaro was off by about 1C. But didn’t want them for temp, so I didn’t get too much into testing that.

DTH:
I used @krlaframboise DTH for the Aeotec Trisensor to get access to it’s advanced settings which is awesome. It’s great that he made it, it’s unfortunate Aeotec didn’t make an official one that runs local.
Fibaro has a local DTH which gives you access to all the advanced settings, this right here is a huge advantage over the Aeotec for people that want to run as much local as possible. Very happy they did this.

Lux:
Here’s where the Fibaro falls VERY short.
With no lights on in a room both the Aeotec and Fibaro had a low lux reading in the 10 range.
When I turn on the lights the Aeotec jumps to 400 lux and the Fibaro goes to 19 lux.
If I shine a flash light directly into the sensor they both go to about 3000-4000 lux.
(I set them both to 2 second lux intervals to fast reporting)
The Fibaro is absolutely terrible is picking up ambient light. You could probably use it to check day or night, but checking if lights are on in a room is absolutely useless, which is unfortunate because it had so much going for it.

However the Aeotec isn’t without faults either. My specific application is I only want a lux report sent when lux changes by 100 lux without having it report lux continually. This works well with the Fibaro stock local DTH. When I shine the flash light into it (with lux time interval set to say 1hr and lux threshold set to 100), in about 3 seconds it updates the lux to 3000, take the light away and in about 3 seconds it it drops to 10. It won’t report lux unless there’s a 100 lux change (or at the 1hr interval mark).
Works perfect.

The Aeotec uses a default Z-Wave Motion/Temp/Lux DTH which has no access to the advanced settings which is why I had to use the custom one from @krlaframboise (which again is great because Aeotec didn’t make one). When you set the threshold to 100 lux and the interval to 1hr, it takes almost 3min on the dot every time to update the lux level when there’s a 100 lux change. If you set the interval to 2 or 3 seconds then it’s just continually reporting lux level non-stop. I’m not sure if that 3min is somewhere in the code (I’ve looked but can’t see it, but I’m not a coder) or if it’s somehow hard coded into the sensor. I’m going to look more into it, but the Fibaro can be setup to only send a lux report when there’s a 100 lux change (with only a 3 second delay) without having to constantly report lux continually to get that fast lux response.

So if you are looking for a motion sensor that runs a local DTH with easy access to advanced settings the Fibaro is by far the way to go vs the Trisensor (you do pay for it though as it is quite a bit more expensive). However if you need more accurate lux settings it’s terrible at that. And now doing some searching on the Fibaro forums I’ve finding posts about this dating back to 2014. So it looks like a very unsensitive lux sensor has been in the units for a very long time.

If you don’t mind running devices in the cloud then the Trisensor with @krlaframboise DTH is a great option and the lux reading are much better to work with. You just can’t get lux threshold updates sooner then 3 min unless you change the interval to shorter times and then it just continually reports lux non-stop.

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