Motion Sensors Tested and Reviewed! Worst and Best Zigbee PIR

so in the smart home world one of my favorite things is smart lighting and you're truly making your home smarter and not just a remote control home so how do you do that well a wireless motion sensor and there's no wiring you just stick it on the wall and add it into your hub and rock and roll now which one should you pick i don't know which one's bad which one's good let's check them all out [Music] so one we won't be checking out that we've done before is the wise wireless sensors and i remember did a pass video on them they did work great using a little usb hub and we used them in home assistant now hey if you want to do something with the wise ecosystem with the whole monitoring bundle and know this isn't the commercial for them it's a great little bundle you can check them out maybe we'll do even a little video of it and we'll show a couple clips of things on that but that's locked away in their cloud so if you're one of the guys like me they'd like to do the local thing and like to have things work and not depend on the internet because sometimes the internet's down and you still want your smart home to work because you know you'll be bragging to somebody about your smart home and the internet goes out and stuff just doesn't work and that sucks keep it local and make it yours so how do you do that well we've had a bunch of different videos on how to set up zigbee with using zigbee to mqtt and that is using home assistant but hey if you are doing things with other hubs such as smart things or amazon echo or openhab there's a bunch of different hubs that use zigbee because it's kind of an open protocol that a lot of different things support and a lot of these motion sensors will work with them and there's no special stuff to flash or wires or install or whatever all of these zigbee products will show you or you just put the batteries in them and you hold the little reset button you pair them straight up and you rock and roll so one thing you won't see here is going to be any z-wave products i don't have any z-wave because of some issues i've had which is local to me nothing wrong with z-wave no hate for it but hey if you want to check out some z-wave stuff maybe we'll leave a link to some other channel that's does a lot of dancing and blinking led stuff on their things and have some great thumbnails showing them now we'll leave all the links down below of course and those are typically going to be affiliate links there's no additional cost to you and the way those work you just click them in rock and roll and don't even have to buy those exact products and it does usually help out the channel so in no particular order i'm going to show the sensors and this is just a pack of triple a batteries just no no commercial for them i just want to give you a size relations because everybody knows what a triple a battery is or should so this one is i would say a pretty pricey one but it does work well and there is a lot of features to it and a lot of customizations to it that you can change for various sensitivities the leds it does have all the different lux sensors and everything it does more than just a motion sensor and of course it does work with the philips hue echo system which is also will work with i use it with zigbee to mqtt now i'm going to leave the little display over it so we can actually see in real time what is going on with the sensors to kind of give you an idea of what how things trigger and whatnot it does come with a little mounting bracket that they you can pivot things on and you can pick this up in various stores locally in the us such as like best buy and target etc and probably even walmart and it does have your aaa's inside and there's nothing really to it i do prefer to have the larger batteries now the downside of that it does make the sensor a lot larger but hey i like having the larger standard batteries because it's easy to go get some batteries around that aren't like the little coin sales third reality or they'll call it the 3r this little icon here and one thing i did like about this one was just the easy use of the mounting bracket it just slides off and you do mount this piece right here you mount that on the wall and then you'll come in and take the sensor and pop it right in and it's designed to be mounted like this with this being the up it has a little angle to it as you can see and what that's for is well they say it's supposed to be quote unquote pet immune because this is angled up a little bit and that way it won't see a shorter dog now of course we did try that with the dog and it's not at lower angle it doesn't work but that's their idea trying to make that pet immune so i do like that this one also has the aaa batteries inside and right here you can see the small little black button you just touch it with your finger and that is the pairing button you hold it down for like five seconds the led will start blinking and you pair it with your smart home app now this is the len kind and we do like a lot of the different lend kinds zigbee stuff from the water leak sensors to the door sensors but the only thing i will say i don't like is this crazy branding they do on the side and all this on the side you could have put that on the back especially this i kind of get putting your brand on there but hey now we're going to take some acetone and wipe both sides of it yeah now the bracket they have on here is they want you to slide it up and what that does actually when you slide that up there's a little switch inside and now it just triggered showing us this tampered and you could do some sort of automation and say hey this one's tampered someone's messing with the motion sensor like the kids taking it down or whatever like that would ever happen and that just pretty cool little feature if you need that now inside there is a cr2450 and that's a little coin cell battery so maybe you won't get as much battery life out of them because these that little coin sells and but these sensors do sleep a lot so we'll see so there's the little reset button right here and that is going to let you pair it up with the smart home app or whatever you hold it down for like five seconds and that's it so this big boy here the ags home now this is a tui brand i have seen several different other models on amazon and it they come up in zigbee to mqtt as a tui model and it does work but you know you could find other ones now one of the cool things i did see on this one is it does have an on and off switch on the back so if you didn't want to use it anymore flip it to often save your batteries and pop your batteries out the little reset that is for using like a little sim card tool and holding it down to do the pairing process same thing you just typically hold it down for like five seconds and the led blinks and you pair it up with your smart home app or hub now there's three aaa's inside this one so it is a larger sensor but hey maybe you'll get a lot of battery life out of it with three triple a's this is the sewn off little zigbee motion sensor it does have quite a big lens on it it has a wide angle to it but it is rather small there's no mounting holes or anything on it they give you the little 3m tape to stick it up to things and you can use whatever and then it does have the little reset on the side that you use the sim card tool on i think they even give you one where to pair it up with the apps or smart home hub now to pop this guy off it does have a cr2450 inside again same little coin sale and i kind of like more of the standard triple a myself we did have one issue with this and i'll show you in one of the clips so this might not be that good for smart lighting in areas but we'll get to that later in the video how this one the iris v3 now i at the time i could find these and they were one of the favorites on our discord channel for doing zigbee motion but as we all know if you've been in the u.s lowe's did stop doing their iris smart home products now you can find these on ebay some refurbs or whatever they're really great sensors so if you do see them around for a great price let us know down in the comments down below they do have the little reset button on the side it does have a little different pairing procedure you can google around you can find the manual but basically you have to hold the button down and you do take the battery out with then hold the button down and put the battery back in you wait for the led to go out and then you let off the button it goes into the pairing mode now this one does have a couple different other sensors to it i think it has temperature and maybe even humidity which is weird but so if you get if you can find these definitely let us know now for the weird little different guy and this does come with like a little stand type deal if you did want to mount it somewhere and i'll show one of the pictures and there is this battery cover is kind of hard to get off but it's a cr2450 underneath the reset button is right here on the side you can push it with your finger or you could use a little tool and the led is up here and the pir face is there interesting little guy and of course it does have a sticker on the bottom if you did want to just stick this somewhere but it is as you can see pretty small and does have a lux sensor which shows you how much light is in the room and there may be temperature but i don't know we'll show some of that later in the video since i'm getting all these mixed up now for that little bonus thing if you were curious of well these won't be included because i don't even think they make these anymore these were the little wise sensors that were pretty awesome for their size i mean they're stupid small and how they're probably smaller than the other the zigbee ones and they will work in the 900 megahertz band but you did have to use their special hub but some cool people that were smarter than me were able to take their little usb radio and allow us to use it locally but then they had some issues where when the batteries would die they would brick themselves so i'm guessing that's probably why they discontinued them i'm not going to go there that's a whole other soapbox but this was the newer model that had their whole little security panel system with the keypad and the door sensors and everything and they definitely went with a larger deal this time around i think it does work with the older hub some of the smart people fixed that up but it's kind of a closed ecosystem so it's they want to do something where we can do it totally local without the cloud maybe we'll cover something different with the y sensors so we've tested every single motion sensor and i chose an area down in the hallway and that way it was a very long distance for being able to pick up motion and we even tried doing pets and the kids and walking to it walking from it and even jumping into it and there was another one with the sonoff one i wanted to show an issue that it had and you'll know exactly what happens whenever we show that little screen with it so we'll run through all those little clips and test and you can find the best zigbee sensor that fits your needs the best [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] so one feature i did want to talk about that a lot of times may not be understood is the cooldown period and what a cool down period is is basically when motion stops and then how long does it take for the sensor to reset back to showing clear or not detected now some sensors you can adjust it such as the philips hue and but some of them others such as the xiaomi aquaria one you can do a hardware mod but it potentially may impact battery life now that one was particularly long it's like a minute and a half it even made doing some of these segments a true pita so i did go scour around through different manufacturers websites and some forms to find various specs on these sensors i didn't want to show them before the test because i didn't want to kind of taint things of you know getting too many numbers in your head because a lot of times the manufacturers may exaggerate on the range of some of these sensors we'll do a little overlay of all the numbers and you can just go ahead and pause it and check things out for you and we did include the cool down periods and i did mention several times so we'll address that elephant in the room the sonoff motion sensor right off the bat it's not going to be on my recommended list it had some issues where even with continued motion it would just go back to clear even though motion was blatantly happening i mean crazy even motion i had my son doing his thing and he may need a little help there but hey that's guess that's my son right one of the issues with it would be if you had that in an area where you're using it for automated lighting and you're guaranteeing that the person moving around is going to keep that sensor triggered well if it goes back to clear then your automation is going to think that there's no one in the room and then of course you're going to piss off that significant other as they're doing the laundry and the lights go dark because of your stupid sensor and then those just points go way down so don't use that one so which one is the best well that's all subjective and i really would never really say there is a best because everybody's needs and where they can get things is always going to be different than say even myself so go through and look at some of the tests pause it rewind it whatever you want to do is go through and find out what you may think is the best for you hey maybe buy one or two that you like now that philips hue and i will say i was really impressed with it but yeah that price i mean it was sometimes even double or triple what some of the other motion sensors are and if i was putting some around i'd probably do a combination maybe of that phillips hue where i really needed it in some good areas combined with maybe that lend kind sensor i don't know they all kind of had their little quirks and everything and they're gonna all react differently based on the different installations if you've got any other sensors you would like us to test or maybe ones i can get my hands on in the us definitely let us know down in the comments down below and like check out some of those sensors and see how they compare to these few sensors so i appreciate you watching smash that like button dislike button or whatever it may be and y'all take care [Music] god damn it oh my god [Music] he just triggered them all he just triggered all of them [Music] all right one time [Music] you

Channel: digiblurDIY

Views: 19,475

Keywords: digiblur, digiblurDIY, zigbee PIR, best zigbee sensor, best zigbee motion sensor, alexa motion sensor, echo motion sensor, smartthings motion sensor, motion sensor review, smarthome motion sensor, wireless motion sensor, home assistant motion, smart lighting how to, digblur, digblurdiy, motion sensor buying guide

Id: 3U1fOqkk3Wg

Length: 18min 53sec (1133 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Buzstringer]

So I have no interest in motion sensors at the moment, but i watched the video to see what all the hate was about.

There is no need for the hate, videos like this are extremely helpful it's also nice to see the devices up close to gauge their size, build quality and which particular designs would fit will in a particular room.

Plus sometimes it's nice to just relax and watch some long form content.

If you really want a table, just copy and paste the spec sheets side by side.

This isn't just about the specs but the journey and testing of each device.

If we are criticising the video, I would like some jokes, as I love comedy. But with 32k subscribers what you are doing is working so don't change it.

TLDR: Great video, Great Info

[u/kylegordon]

Is there a transcript somewhere or a table of data available?

[u/probablyreasonable]

Look, it's clear that a lot of time and effort went into this, but this video and its form and format irritates me. I get that you're trying to build subscribers and whatnot, and I'm sure midroll ads on a ~20min video net some return for you, but the data would be so much more useful to literally everyone if you just put up a table.

First click, I skipped straight to the conclusion. It's mildly infuriating that you conclusion referred back to the rest of the video. No recommendation or conclusion at all outside of "Hue was impressive to me." In what way? Why was it impressive? Is this relative to the other sensors, or just independently impressive? If I want to find out why you think it's impressive, I have to go back to the appropriate timestamp and watch your testing, and then watch all other videos to figure it out. The theme of "tune in to find out" continues in this thread with comments like this.

This whole thing rubs me the wrong way. It really feels like when a corporation tries to wrap an open source project in some paid wrapper. It really feels like the form and format of this review is specifically and intentionally designed to cause people to watch 18 minutes of review content, and that's highly annoying when you're pitching this as a useful and thorough review benefitting the open source & DIY communities.

my $0.02.

[u/Thuringwethon]

THIS

This is what we lack the most. Thorough tests of different devices across brands to help folks make informed purchase decisions.

@Automate Your Life also has nice motions sensors comparisons (#dkjZeZCZFps and #004dCgeLSiQ), including Z-Wave sensors however they lack actual live tests side by side like OP did. He also did it from SmartThings pov (and it's weird "device handlers" thingy).

This is the best comparison so far, well done. The only downside it comes late, after I already done the purchases just 2 weeks ago. ;)

[u/Dargish]

Nice video! Do you have any information on the horizontal angle they can cover? I imagine a couple of places I want these but both would be in corners where I'd want it to clearly see atleast a 90 degree arc, would that be common among all these sensors?

[u/jimmyleet]

Can anyone sum up for me what worked the best? I just need a motion sensor for my hallway to turn on/off lights

[u/h7454Gdfgd]

Do any of these ZigBee sensors also have temperature and humidity reporting? My go-to motion sensor is a zwave one that also reports these. I'd love to switch to ZigBee though, because I prefer it over zwave.

[u/traxtar944]

Comparable video for z wave motion sensors?

[u/androidusr]

Thanks. It's nice to get a break down like that. Or looks like all these are indoor sensors. If like to find an outdoor one that uses AAA batteries.