Comment on Got myself some energy monitoring Zigbee plugs and made an interesting discovery
Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I bought two “Eightree” brand Zigbee-compatible plugs to see how they fare.
Did you need a Zigbee hub to get them working? I was gifted an Eighttree Zigbee plug with energy monitoring, but it seems to require using a hardware hub :(
lka1988@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Yeah, anything Zigbee needs a hub of some sort that interfaces with the server. Zigbee is a mesh-lioe network of its own - it doesn’t use wifi or Bluetooth or anything.
I bought Nabu Casa’s Connect ZBT-1 dongle; it’s like $35 and plugs directly into the HA server. Super simple to configure as well, since HAOS detects it automatically. Plus, the smart plugs act as routers, so as long as the devices can see each other all the way to the dongle on the server, you shouldn’t need anything else.