Hi everyone. Like many of you, I just acquired a Hubitat Elevation and am preparing to switch from Smartthings.
I'm currently using some older monoprice door and window sensors.
For my windows: Monoprice 15270
For my doors: Monoprice 15268 (recessed)
All of my sensors are located close to hardwired zwave plus devices acting as repeaters. However, I find that with the recessed sensors especially, I often end up with a lot of missed events. I.e. door will register as open, but the close event isn't picked up and then I get messages about one of my doors being left open. Not sure if this is a smartthings problem or a monoprice sensor problem, but either way I'm sick of it and want to replace both. ST will be gone, Hubitat on order. What to do about the sensors, though?
Install environment is Canada, so in winter the doors can get a little chilly.
aeotec's Series 7 z-wave door window sensor was one I was looking at, but it looks like people on the forums here have issue with Aeotec being kind of iffy in terms of things like building a pointless tilt feature and having firmware that doesn't match parameter instructions. Also, apparently only the pro is available in Canada, and I don't really need the pro features.
Can anyone point me in the right direction? Does anyone have the Aeotec linked above, or the series 7 recessed? I don't NEED a recessed, but it helped with the wife and visible sensors factor.
Is there another brand of zwave (or zigbee, I'm indifferent) sensor where it's number one selling feature is bulletproof reliability in terms of events being captured? Having missed events and then notifications about doors and windows being left open when they aren't actually is a major wife annoyance (although notifications are great when they ARE left open, mind you).
Thank you! Looking forward to joining this community. I also see my favourite ever people from Inovelli are here. Hint hint hurry up on the door and window sensors, guys!
Personally I've got a few Xiaomi Aqara Zigbee contact sensors and, so far, they have worked completely reliably - as in, 100% of the time and immediately. I don't think they're on the officially supported list though... I like them as they work really well (so far), are cheap, and really small.
Welcome. Some advice, I have about 200.00 of Xiaomi junk, they will connect but wreak havoc on zigbee mesh, read the 1000+ posts, and you have to be very careful about other zigbee repeaters creating issues.
I use and have great success with Sylvania door sensors, Iris V2 & V3 contact sensors, and Ecolink contact sensors(10 for $44.00USD). Watch- some ecolinks are not zigbee, make sure you get the zigbee model. All listed above report temp. There's also the visonic MCT contact sensors. They use a CR2032 and battery life is not so great.
They all report 100% of the time. And zigbee is faster than z-wave, by a few 100 milliseconds, trust me you'll notice it with lighting automations on stairs.
I agree with your advice to not use Xiaomi sensors directly on Hubitat. However, while these sensors fall off the mesh at random intervals, and sometimes en masse, they have never interfered with the function of other devices on the zigbee mesh. Unless you mean something else by "wreak havoc".
There are also ways to integrate them with Hubitat. For example, they are very stable on zigbee2mqtt and can be "imported" into Hubitat via Home Assistant or Node-RED. As @SmartHomePrimer has pointed out, they're also very stable on the Mijia bridge which integrates into Home Assistant by multiple methods.
Agree. Definitely not junk, just not very stable with the built in radio to the hub. They need either a Xiaomi hub, or a ConBee 2, or one of the TI based controllers seem to work well with them. As @aaiyar mentioned, there are several very viable and relatively simple ways to integrate these hubs and alternate Zigbee controllers with HE now.
Zigbee end devices won’t cause stability issues on the mesh though. They’ll just fall off.
Well, junk is a subjective term. For me, after the 4th or 5th time my Xiaomi devices dropped off the mesh they went in the trash - which by my definition is junk.
What materials are used in the walls and doors? Some materials like Metal doors have been known to interfere with signal, particularly for recessed sensors.
I don’t think it’s metal. I say that only because I was able to drill through it with a normal bit to enlarge the opening for a new smart lock to replace the deadbolt.
A few months back I made this transition from ST to Hubitat. I actually purchased both a Aeotec 7 door/window sensor along with a Ring Door/Window Gen2 sensor. In the end I chose the Ring Sensor for a few reasons. One of the biggest one is that it is a active device used with a alarm system and it fairly regularly reports home it's status with battery information. The seem to work well and are relatively affordable with $20 per sensor or $99 for a pack of 6. They also use SmartStart and will connect with S2 security to your new Hubitat C-7 hub.
So far they have been super reliable. Just remember a good mesh is always key and if you have any chance of issues it may not be a bad idea to pick up the new Ring extender as well since it is Gen 7. They have some pretty good functionality as I understand it with battery backup.
"pointless" is in the eye of the beholder. I was planning to get the Aeotec sensors just for the tilt feature. I was planning to use them on garage doors where its easier to detect the tilt of the upper panel when it moves than it is to line up magnets on a metal side rail to detect the motion. Also, I think only the "pro" version has the tilt feature - there's a slightly less expensive version without it.
I tried to sell them (for pennies on the dollar nonetheless) - with full disclaimer that they were non-standwrd zigbee devices... no offers. So in the trash they went.
Too bad. I guess I missed that. Bought some from another member for my daughter’s apartment at a very good price. It’s great that so many people are finding ways to keep these stable. These are my primary sensors. They’re among the most stable devices I own with a compatible gateway.
Hopefully this will change here. I hate to hear that perfectly good devices are going to landfill. There’s definitely some devices that never should have been produced in the first place. And I apologize if it sounds like I’m criticizing. I might have given mine away or they would still be in my “junk” pile if I had never tried them with a Xiaomi hub. That proved to me they were actually really good devices, just not standard Zigbee as you point out. They just needed the compatible controller and a way to get them back to HE where I wanted them. That started out very convoluted, expensive for most and limited. Today it’s rather inexpensive and the only restriction is compatible repeaters must still be maintained, regardless of the controller.
We should stop hijacking the thread, but I do not disagree that they have specific requirements. Doesn’t make them bad devices. As a Z-Wave user, that should be an obvious example you’re familiar with.
Eh, I've never had a zwave device that required a proprietary hub other than vivint thermostat - and even that is by design/per spec as part of the anti-theft zwave command class.
