Here’s how I think about temperature sensors for home automation. I reach for them for one of a few reasons:
- Comfort - I want a room held at a certain temperature or humidity.
- Function - I want to act on a reading, like turning a bathroom fan on when someone is showering and back off once the humidity drops.
- The “I’m an idiot” reason - I forget to shut the drink fridge or the garage freezer. In one case the drinks went warm and a wall of ice built up at the back; in another, an open freezer door spoiled close to a thousand dollars of food while my wife and I were at the hospital for a couple of days. Coming home to that is no fun.
For those last two categories I don’t need accuracy, I need a delta - a change worth alerting on. For the comfort category you can apply an offset so the reading tracks true, but our Ecobee has temperature pucks, so I usually lean on those for comfort instead.