Aqara FP300 with Home Assistant (ZHA): weeks of real-world use

Aqara Products
, , , , ,
1

Hi everyone,

I’ve been running the Aqara FP300 for a few weeks now in Home Assistant and wanted to share a practical write-up for anyone who prefers local control and uses ZHA.

TL;DR

  • The FP300 has been very reliable for me in daily use (office / desk work).
  • ZHA support is in progress upstream. Until it lands in the mainline, you can use a local custom quirk to unlock the full set of entities/settings.
  • Battery reporting looks great on my unit so far (still 100% after ~6 weeks), but there are also reports of wrong “empty battery” readings on some devices.
  • Full hands-on with screenshots/graphs (German :de:, lots of visuals): Aqara FP300 Hands-on: Erste Eindrücke, Setup & Zigbee-Voraussetzungen

Real-world reliability (weeks of daily use)

My main use-case is desk work: long periods with very little movement (typing, scrolling, sitting still). This is where many presence sensors (and especially PIR-only sensors) struggle.

With the FP300, occupancy stays stable and vacancy is detected reliably when I actually leave the room. Over multiple weeks I only saw 1–2 false positives (occupied while the room was empty), which is excellent in my book.

Comparison vs. Tuya ZG-204M

I also compared the FP300 side-by-side with a Tuya ZG-204M mmWave sensor:

  • FP300 keeps occupancy more consistently (fewer dropouts to “no occupancy” while I’m still there).
  • During the night (empty room), FP300 stayed quiet for me, while the Tuya showed more short “ghost” occupancies.

Of course, every environment is different (room layout, reflections, placement), but the difference in my setup was clear.

Response time

Response time feels very fast, even using only the occupancy status for automations. I’ve also read that using the dedicated PIR detection entity can be even slightly faster, but occupancy alone is already plenty for my use case.

Battery notes (so far very promising)

My FP300 still reports 100% battery after almost 8 weeks. Time will tell if the advertised ~2 years are realistic, but I’d already be very happy with ~1 year, especially since most mmWave sensors require permanent USB power.

That said, there are reports of the battery being shown as empty after only a few days, even though the cell measures fine and it’s also reported as empty in the Aqara app (so it may be a firmware/reporting/calibration issue). I couldn’t reproduce this on my unit, but here’s the thread for reference:

Background: why FP300 can look “underwhelming” in ZHA at first

When you pair the FP300 in ZHA, it’s possible you’ll initially see only the “basic” sensors such as:

  • Temperature
  • Humidity
  • Illuminance

At the same time, you may notice that things like presence/occupancy, distance, battery, and some of the more interesting device settings exist on the device level, but are not exposed as usable entities in Home Assistant.

This is usually not a “broken device” situation - it’s simply a matter of device-specific handling that needs to be added in zha-quirks / zha-device-handlers so ZHA knows how to map everything properly.

Current status: upstream ZHA support is in progress (PR in review)

To improve FP300 support for everyone, I created a dedicated ZHA quirk for the FP300 and submitted it upstream.

Important expectation-setting: even once a PR is merged, it can still take a while until:

  1. it is released in a zha-quirks version, and
  2. Home Assistant picks up that updated dependency in a stable release.

If you don’t want to wait for official support to ship, you can use the quirk locally via ZHA’s custom_quirks_path.

A key troubleshooting note (because it gets people all the time):
If you restart HA and nothing changes, remove the device from ZHA and re-pair it. Many quirks apply during the initial device interview, so re-pairing is often the decisive step.

Optional: full hands-on write-up (German)

I wrote a longer hands-on with screenshots/graphs here (it’s in German, but has lots of visuals):

If you want, tell me what firmware version you’re on and whether you’re pairing FP300 via Matter/Thread first or going straight Zigbee/ZHA — I’m happy to compare notes and refine the guidance based on what others see in the field.

7 Likes
3

Thank you for your professional review and insights. I believe this post will inspire many users.

4

Thanks so much for your work on this. I recently got an FP300 and have set it up with ZHA and the custom quirks. I can see presence detection for occupancy in HA, but don’t see a seperate PIR sensor for Motion. Am I missing something or is that how it’s meant to work?