I love my ST Hub and setting up a new system at my parents. Will need alot motion sensor and water sensors and the Aeotec are expensive.
Are there any other brands that works well with the Smartthings Hub? Thanks for the suggestions…
Which country are you in? And which model hub do your parents have? The device selections do vary a bit.
You can get lots of cheap Tuya ZigBee motion, contact, water and temperature sensors on AliExpress. Most work well with ST.
Make sure you get ZigBee ones not WiFi or Bluetooth. Avoid the temperature sensors with LCD displays.
Im in the USA and have Smartthings V3. Any sensors that may be bought from amazon or ebay would be great.
Hi thanks for the recommendation. Is it safe to have sensors like these tied into your network? I was told better to not order no-name brands that will be tied into your wifi network due to potential hacking into the network. Not sure this is true or if this applies to zigbee protocols.
Many people like Tuya made sensors, and they are certainly inexpensive. The problem is that Tuya uses a lot of proprietary code, which means you will almost certainly have to use custom edge drivers, and then you have the issue that even though the community developers are usually great, they may decide to move on a different platform or SmartThings may just change something which causes the custom Driver to stop working. I might choose to use that for myself, but I certainly wouldn’t put it in my parents’ home as it’s just going to be a more fragile system.
Personally, I really like using aqara sensors with their own hub and then use matter to bring that into SmartThings. It’s a local connection, reliable, in my experience stays connected much better than if the aqara sensors are connected to the SmartThings hub instead, and no custom code is required. At this point, the Matter bridge option works for most of their Zigbee sensors, but you can check their website to be sure before you buy it. And you can buy the devices at Amazon.
As of the time of this posting, you can use the M2 hub or the G3 camera hub as the matter bridge from aqara to SmartThings. But you won’t be able to use the camera functionality within SmartThings. You can still use it on its own with the aqara app. We have ours indoors in the front of the house facing the driveway and it’s a nice little camera as well as a matter bridge.
In future, the M3 hub from aqara will have even more functionality as it will be both a matter controller and a matter bridge, but it’s not available yet, so I expect you won’t want to wait for that.
(Aqara also makes a couple of sensor models which use thread instead of Zigbee and are individually certified for matter and you can add those directly to SmartThings without going through an aqara hub, no custom code required, but those models do cost more at this time.)
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That shouldn’t be an issue with Zigbee, Zwave, or thread. It’s not impossible that they could be hacked, but they can’t get onto your laptop or phone or anything else with meaningful data and the hacker would have to be physically very close to the home, at which point it’s easier to just get in through a window. So unless you would consider your parents’ home a high value specific target, in which case you’re not likely to be using SmartThings anyway, I wouldn’t worry about it. 
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Hacking shouldn’t be a problem since they are ZigBee not WiFi. And if they did get hacked they don’t have access to your WiFi system.
Most of the basic sensors work with @Mariano_Colmenarejo Edge drivers. The ones with LCD displays do NOT work with his drivers.
Again avoid the Tuya WiFi sensors. They don’t work with ST, eat batteries and could possibly be hacked.
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and it is on Sale this week (until April 21, 2024) @ The Smartest House:
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First thing to do if you get an M2 is to make sure it’s updated to the most recent firmware
Thanks everyone. I ordered some Tuya Zigbee Flood Sensor Smart APP Remote Monitoring Water Leakage Detector DIY, from ebay since it was inexpensive to test them out. Shipping from China so will take a while.
But with that, will this be an easy pair up where ST will self discover the water sensor once in pair mode?
Can anyone walk me thru the process to install these? Thank you again everyone. If these work we’ll. I’ll bd ordering alot of them.
Tuya Zigbee devices tend to be among the most complex to pair with SmartThings, because they use a lot of proprietary code.
See the community FAQ for a step-by-step description of the process to get them to work:
FAQ: Using Tuya Zigbee Devices Directly With a SmartThings/Aeotec Hub (2024)
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Should be straight forward to discover if you have the correct driver installed. Also, the process would simply be to remove the sticker so the battery can start working or install a new battery if required, long press a button in the device and then press ‘scan near by’ in smartthings. It will get paired straightaway and you can use that device for your routines.
I have these Tuya Zigbee devices; motion sensor, Curtain Motor, Presence Sensor, Smoke detector, Button, Gas detector and Smart Plug and I know the drivers for these devices. If you are going to order them in Aliexpress, then I can send the link to all along with the drivers you need to install - just let me know.
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Hi, Thank you! Yes- I would love to get the drivers for the Tuya for Motion sensor, Presence sensor, gas detector and if you have the water detector sensor.
Can you also advise how do I add the drivers to my system? I am sooo sorry for this ask, but Im complete newbie to non- ST devices.
Do you want me to send the aliexpress link to purchase those devices as the drivers have these device models specified in them so if you buy some other device and try to use the driver, it may not work?
All custom edge drivers are added in the same way. See the first section of the community FAQ.
FAQ: I have no idea what Edge is. Is that a new developer tool? (2022)
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