I use my smartthings multi-sensor to read the temperature in a room and turn on/off a space heater.
I’ve been looking at the sensor events in the last couple of days, and here are a few observations:
The temperature reported by the sensor is consistently 2-3 degrees lower than what is reported by a couple of other thermometers in the same room
The reported temperature has wide variations in small amounts of time, for no apparent reason; for example, last night the sensor reported changes in room temperature from 64 to 66 degrees in a 15 minutes span, without any heating (space heater or central heating) occurring; then temperature jumped back down to 65 a few minutes later, 63 a few minutes later, and back to 64 eventually…
I don’t care much about 1); after all, once I know what the offset between the sensor and the “real” temperature is, that’s a non-problem; but 2) is quite disruptive, and makes for a fairly erratic space heater control… what can cause such large, physically unjustified, swings?
Yeah, I’ve noticed both of these too. (1) is still an issue if there’s no way to calibrate the readings. I have several of these, and even when side by side they all give different readings–though all clustered around a few degrees below the temperature from an actual thermometer.
And I have also noticed (2), and wondered what would cause that.
I guess I’ve given up on using the temperature readings from these to do anything useful.
My fear is that calibration issues can be addressed through software; but erratic reading issues seem to be symptomatic of “bad” or cheap hardware… tought to patch that.