While researching air sensors I remember reading that the polling frequency has an impact on the sensor life. It seems that polling is happening every 1 second , at least for particulate data.
Can that be decreased? I am fine with less frequent polling as this is for a home install.
Thank you in advance!
The PMS5003(T) sensor behaves somewhat weirdly here. For any period shorter than 30 seconds it will not stop its operation at all and will continue measuring the environment every second. Only for periods longer than that it will go to “sleep” between measures.
Regardless, yes, it is possible to reduce the polling frequency. I don’t know if the stock firmware exposes this functionality, but @MallocArray’s ESPHome-based firmware definitely allows for it.
I’ve seen a mention in the ESPHome component for the sensor where someone stated a lifespan based on hours of the sensor running, but I never found documentation from the manufacturer stating anything like that. Plantower does have a 3 year expected life for the PMS5003, but doesn’t qualify that with anything about the polling interval
We have some firmware versions running since a couple of years that have a sleep mode and others that are constantly on. We don’t see a systematic pattern that the sleep mode would extent the lifetime.
On the contrary the most frequent failure is insects getting in and I believe the sleep mode would that make more likely because the fan is not spinning.