I haven't needed to change the batteries on a single sensor yet for multiple years. I did get 2 of their SpeakerHubs which also act range extenders, but it's completely unnecessary since the single hub is perfectly fine wherever you put it. I mainly use the SpeakerHubs as sirens, but they can also do text to speech, e.g. "(Loud Siren) Water Leak detected in master bath".
They've already saved me a couple of times.
I keep reading about all these standards for connected devices e.g. Matter, but in the end these just work perfectly for my use case.
We once tested putting sensors 8ft under ground, down a manhole for the water mains. They kept on working through dirt, steel and concrete even with the manhole cover in place.
Prior to seeing this I was thinking about how to use the Meshtastic [0] project to fundamentally provide simple UDP services for message brokering over LoRa. There are so many sensors that could easily hook or connect to devices acting as network routers that could bridge other protocols across long distances very easily.
Have you looked at doing something similar with ZWave at all?
Fast forward 2-3 years, after a (funded!) open source project, there is now a way to mount Zigbee sensors in remote locations. Essentially the solution is a wireless bride, which works like this:
- A remote Raspberry PI unit collects&compresses zigbee data and transmits it over LoRaWAN
- LoRaWAN gateway/servers forward the data towards second PI, which decompresses the data ,takes care of the device management and sends the data further to, e.g., home assistant.
And as a bonus: The device joining process is as easy as it is with zigbee2mqtt ;)