Comment by X-Istence
7 hours ago
I got a bunch of the Aqara WSDCGQ11LM's around my house, and every single one after 3-6 months the battery is dead. The Zigbee network in my house is strong, and stable and yet they keep running out of battery.
Once out of battery, replacing the battery means you need to re-pair them to the network since they don't rejoin automatically. Thankfully Home Assistant sees it as the same device, but it has been a pain, and the batteries get expensive really quickly.
I've been slowly replacing them with Ikea's Matter sensors instead, they have a display that comes on when you tap them, and join the rest of my Thread network. Slowly over time I am likely to replace all of my Zigbee based devices with Matter/Thread based devices because it seems to be far more stable for my use cases than most of my Zigbee devices, especially battery powered ones seem to last much longer when using the Matter/Thread based versions.
Something is wrong somewhere, because I've had ~15 of those and battery life is 16-20 months for me (I use Battery Notes in HA which keeps a timestamp since you last changed the battery so I have a pretty good view into battery life). I have not adjusted reporting thresholds/intervals in zigbee2mqtt.
They're really annoying to pair though, so I've replaced most of them with Sonoff SNZB-02P which runs a CR2477 battery and I expect the battery life to be at least 3 years; with some luck maybe 4? Not as slim however, but the built-in magnet makes up for it.
I hate that ikea switched like that.
What's your experience with Matter / Thread? Is it a case of buying a different USB dongle and devices?
Yeah I am wondering what's actually needed for thread/matter in home assistant. Do you need a sidecar server? Do you need to install addons in Home Assistant? What of my existing Thread / Matter routers (HomePod Minis).
I've tried a couple of times but just gave up because zigbee/zwave work well enough and I'm not sure I'll like where thread/matter end up in a decade.
> What of my existing Thread / Matter routers (HomePod Minis).
Pair the HomePod with home assistant, install the matter service, and you're good to go.