I had issues with my garage fridge last year. Took a while to figure out, but there was a small box at the bottom that was occasionally keeping the door from closing completely. The Zigbee sensor was great tracking what happened when and helping me narrow down the cause.
replyDid the exact same thing, which is how I discovered our fridge was actually staying around 10-15 deg Celsius inside for half the summer.
replyRecommend this exercise to everyone.
And it communicates OK to outside the fridge? I would have thought a fridge is pretty close to a Faraday cage
replyFor me, the Zigbee ones (generic ones from AliExpress) have been great inside both fridge and freezer. Bluetooth ones occasionally dropped off (and were much worse re: battery life.)
replyWhat happen to the batteries when inside the freezer ? Sensors seems to be fine at -20°C, but is it the case for standard AAA or CRC32 batteries ?
replyIt does, though in my case I've purposefully put an IKEA smart plug (which acts as a Thread/Matter router) in the kitchen, too, so the signal only needs to reach 2-3 meters out.
replyYeah I thought this might be an issue but it's been running flawless for months without ever dropping out.
replyI did the same and just added zigbee repeater outside the fridge.
replyWorks great.
The door seal is plastic/rubber and is RF transparent.
replyThats a cool (!) idea.
A zigbee knob + a PID loop would be a nice complement.
replyThe controls engineer in me just vomited at the thought of a PID loop with 6 hr feedback
replyDid you make sure those hot peaks are not your fridge's defrost cycle?
replyWhat would normally happen is I’d start seeing things freeze so I’d adjust it hotter until one time some things went mouldy sooner than I’d expect so I put the sensor in the fridge to get a better idea what is going on. Seeing the data, the fridge seems to once every couple months just move to a colder temp and stay there until I adjust it back again which is why I think it’s just the button getting bumped.
replyBeing able to see the fridge temp to a tenth of a degree and getting alerted when it’s wrong has been much more useful than I expected. The safe fridge temp is a fairly narrow band that’s basically impossible to hit without a proper temp sensor.
Sounds like, in your case, this narrow temperature band is impossible to hit without a proper refrigerator.
replyPS: You have seen Alec's unbelievably detailed encounter with the cheap red refrigerator, right?
I've worked in grocery retail, and this is exactly the boring problem that quietly eats money: a fridge drifts a couple of degrees overnight and nobody notices until the stock has to go in the bin. a cheap sensor with an alert for "out of range for 20+ minutes" pays for itself the first time it fires. the "too long" part matters more than precision, door openings make single readings useless
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