As one of the initial steps in my smart home journey back in November 2023, I purchased a set of 12 Aqara Temperature and Humidity Sensors for £101 (approximately £8 each) from Aliexpress. Today, this same set is available for around £89, or £7.40 each.
This was the start of my Zigbee experiments, and you can read more about the initial setup in my first post talking about my initial setup and home assistant dashboarding.
Since then, my Zigbee mesh has continued to expand with a bunch of powered devices, and I have had to start my first round of battery changes on the Aqara sensors. There have also been some power cuts leading to my hub turning off, many home assistant restarts and upgrades, and I feel that I have some more to share.
To this date I have still only permanently fixed one of these sensors in any way, most of them are just resting in nice out-of-the-way places, or on top of door frames.
