Most smart home sensors are designed for use inside the house, which is where their presence is most useful. But there’s no reason the data they gather and triggers they enable can’t have utility outside, too. Here are a few all-weather examples of outdoor sensors that you might have overlooked.
Weatherproof motion sensors
The simplest outdoor automation tool
Motion sensors typically rely on passive infrared in order to detect changes in radiation and identify heat patterns. These heat patterns are most commonly associated with people and animals, which makes them perfect for triggering events that rely on the presence of a person (and, at the same time, makes them somewhat imperfect).
Motion sensors are nothing new; security lights have used them for decades, but adding them to your smart home system makes them so much more powerful. Sure, you can trigger a motion light, but you can go a step further, like triggering a whole set of lights at once, pushing an alert to a mobile device, or playing a notification over a smart speaker inside the house.
You can even trigger camera recordings with the right setup, just in case your cameras aren’t particularly good at identifying movement or you’d like to see what happens in the lead-up to a recording being triggered by the camera itself. Give the Philips Hue outdoor sensor a look, with a bulk discount available for two or more. You might get away with an indoor sensor placed somewhere relatively dry, like a mailbox (as pictured above) too.
- Weight
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0.19 kg
- Connectivity
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Bluetooth, Zigbee
The Philips Hue Outdoor Sensor lets you control all your lights automatically. As soon as someone steps in front of the sensor, all of the lights will come on, illuminating the path easily.
Outdoor thermometers and hygrometers
Trigger automations based on the current climate
Indoor thermometers and hygrometers measure air temperature and relative humidity, and they’re vital inside your house. You can use them to efficiently run your heating and cooling, turn on dehumidifiers, or gather data about different parts of your house and its efficiency.
If you’re a bit of a data nerd, you’ll likely enjoy having access to historic data from these sensors. But there’s a lot you can do with information gleaned from outside temperature and humidity data, too. With a smart home system like Home Assistant monitoring an outside sensor, you can get alerts when the temperature drops to certain levels, so you know to start your car a little earlier or leave time to de-ice door handles and windscreens.
You can integrate this data into something of a morning briefing, or simply have it at a glance in your dashboard without having to venture outside. Having an accurate outdoor temperature reading can be more useful than relying on a weather plugin (I currently use two weather cards in Home Assistant, and they’re both different). You can even get smart recommendations that could save you money, like an alert to turn off the AC and open your windows instead.
These don’t have to break the bank, with the Switchbot Indoor/Outdoor Thermo-Hygrometer coming in at around $15 for an IP65-rated Bluetooth model.
Turn on your outdoor lights or recieve security notifications
Outdoor contact sensors work just like indoor contact sensors by using a magnet to detect when both parts of the sensor pair are together (closed) or apart (open). Weather proofing is the only difference, so be prepared to pay a bit more for a sensor that can survive outside.
Once you’ve got one, you can do some neat things with it. For convenience or security, you can preemptively turn on garden or porch lights as soon as your front gate opens, rather than waiting for a motion sensor to kick in. You could get a ping indoors on your smart sensor or mobile device when this happens, notifying you of a visitor before the doorbell rings.
You can also get alerts that the gate is open after certain hours or for set durations, so you can head outside and close it. This is especially useful if you have a dog or other pets to make sure they don’t escape your yard. Just like a motion sensor on a garage door, you could tie the status of your front gate to a light inside your house so that if the light is on, you know the door is open.
The Yolink outdoor contact sensor ($58) is rugged and broadly compatible with a range of systems.
- Temperature Range
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-4°F – 122°F
- Connectivity
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Alexa voice assistant and IFTTT
This outdoor sensor will alert you when whatever you’ve attached it to is opened or closed, making it easy to tell if a window was opened, or the mail came in.
Weather stations and gauges
Go beyond temperature and humidity
Weather stations go a step further than simple temperature and humidity, keeping you abreast of rainfall, wind direction and speed, and barometric pressure. As long as you position it correctly, this gives you a set of hyper-local triggers based on the conditions in your own backyard.
I’ve been meaning to set one of these up for fun. I’ve always been fond of the idea of a weather station, but one that’s integrated into Home Assistant and logged accordingly seems all the more useful. I’ve been considering an Ambient Weather Station because, for around $200, you can get everything you need in one package.
Get immediate notification about rainfall, perfect for setting a notification inside to fetch the laundry. Use this rainfall data to intelligently control irrigation systems, only watering if rain has been very light. Get advanced warning for wind gusts that might indicate now is a good time to remove any loose items in the back yard that you might never see again.
You can also contribute to the Ambient Weather Network, a platform that effectively crowdsources weather information by sharing metrics across the internet worldwide. If you’re a weather nerd, you’re going to love it.
Lightning sensors
Know when to unplug your electronics
By far one of the coolest sensors you can get for any smart home setup, lightning sensors do exactly what the name would suggest: detect lightning strikes. They work at distances of around 25 miles from the nearest activity and, outside of giving you some juicy data that you can pore over during the middle of a storm, might actually be pretty useful.
I live in the sub-tropics where heavy storms can be incredibly damaging, with the heaviest of the bunch almost always starting with a few cracks of thunder. Having advanced warning to close up the house, put the car in the garage, move any delicate plant pots, and batten down the hatches is very much appreciated. If you don’t have a surge protector (and even if you do), you’ll also know to unplug any sensitive devices.
Sure, the local weather probably does this for you, but does it tell you how far away a strike has been detected so you can see the storm approaching in real-time? I think not! The EcoWitt WH57 ($56) is a fine place to start for this.
- Temperature Range
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32~122F
- Monitors
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Detects lightning bolts and storms within 25 miles
The EcoWitt WH57 is an out door lightning detection sensor that works with EcoWitt’s existing gateways and can sense lightning strikes as far as 25 miles (40 km) away. Use it with Home Assistant via the EcoWitt integration to track and set up automations based on local weather conditions.
Don’t forget about power
The worst thing about outdoor sensors is powering them. Contact sensors are almost always battery-powered, but most of these other devices will need some sort of mains power.
