Ecowitt WS90 (Powered by Shelly) - 7-in-1 Weather Station Zigbee and Bluetooth, Ultrasonic Wind, Capacitive Rain, UV, Solar

On paper, this WS90 ticks pretty much every box you'd expect from a weather station designed for home automation. Seven measurements in a single housing, ultrasonic wind measurement and capacitive rain detection, so no moving parts to maintain or see seize up after two winters. Add an IPX5 rating, solar power with lithium AA batteries as backup, and a heating plate against frost, and you have a serious outdoor sensor built to last.

But the real question is what it's like in Home Assistant. And that's where the Powered by Shelly version stands out from the standard WS90: it ditches the original Sub-GHz radio in favour of Zigbee and Bluetooth. Concretely, you pair the station directly to your Zigbee coordinator via Zigbee2MQTT or ZHA, with no proprietary gateway and no cloud. Measurements come up locally, taken from your garden, at the service of your watering, blind, or storm alert automations. For a full-local HA setup, this is exactly what you're looking for.

Honesty demands some caution, though. Integration via the Shelly Smart Control app remains immature: several users report incomplete or inaccurate data on the app side, and going through a Shelly BLU Gateway in BTHome can cause discovery issues in HA. Even on the Zigbee2MQTT side, not everything is perfect: there are reports of frozen values after pairing, sensors dropping to zero intermittently, or readings that require some YAML and a few filters to stay reliable over time. Firmware updates, meanwhile, remain tedious. Nothing deal-breaking for a HA veteran, but far from plug-and-play.

Against it, the standard WS90 in Sub-GHz with an Ecowitt gateway retains an advantage: its official Home Assistant integration is more mature and stable, and it allows remote console display (impossible here, the Shelly version no longer emits on RF). The Powered by Shelly version, meanwhile, bets everything on native Zigbee and local, making it significantly more relevant than Netatmo and other cloud stations for an open home automation ecosystem. Overall, we give it a 4/5: excellent hardware and a 100% local approach that hits the mark, only held back by a software layer still being broken in. If your Zigbee coordinator is already running and YAML doesn't scare you, this is one of the best weather stations right now for home automation.