I want to add two contact sensors for my garage doors. Being the garage they don't have to be small or slick.....just work. I'm not looking for a cheap sensor, I want them to work reliably and have some sort of "heartbeat" ie battery status or........
Any suggestions?
John
The Itead Sonoff Contact sensor is really reliable and has a heartbeat (with my driver Presence). They are Zigbee 3.0 compliant. Normally I would not recommend them due to size and design, but if those things don't matter much they're very good. They are recently released so no one has used them for more than a month or so, but for me they have been perfect even in an otherwise problematic dev mesh.
I just use the cheap smartthings V5 multisensor along with the "Device Watchdog App" to check the status every morning. I 've only been using it since sometime in January so the battery only has 7 months on it. It's showing 71% on the Watchdog app today. My Zigbee mesh is good and I have 5 more of those sensors on other doors in the house. They also report temp. I have the watchdog app set to notify me if there hasn't been any activity for 10 hours. I use it monitor all of my battery powered devices. I also have it set to alert me when the battery level reaches a certain percentage. There are also Z-Wave options available.
I have a couple Sengled contact senors outside on my gates. They have been setup for a couple of months now. They are both showing 100% battery and so far have held up to the heat (forecast is 114 today). Response time is good and one of them gets a daily workout when the mailman drops off. I have them tied to both rules and an Alexa notification.
Visonic MCT-350 work well.
Pleased to see this...I have a boat-load of Visonics. Love their small form factor and reliability on ST, glad to hear it's the same on HE.
I have 14 Visonic MCT-340 E contact sensors. They are zigbee sensors and work great with Hubitat. I have never had problems with any of them. They seem solid as a rock. They report the contact status, temperature and battery status. The good news is that they are cheap, about $15 each.
+1 for Visonic MCT-340 E contact sensors
Iris sensors work for me. The V1 are sort of quirky to pair, but otherwise they have been good. The later standard Zigbee Iris are much better.
They are dirt cheap on Ebay, you can get 10 sensors for like $50 or so.
Thanks for all the responses. Looks like a couple of choices but the response for the Visonic MCT-340E seems to be a very good option so I'll go with them.
On the subject, the Sengled contact looked good in Amazon and I like their classic bulb, any feedback on these?
I have the contact sensor and it's very small. Have it attached to my Bulldog water shutoff valve to verify open/closing. Also have one on a window.. they show up as "Generic Zigbee Contact Sensor (no temp)"... so have less features than the others but seem to work well.. it's only been a couple of months though.
How cold will the sensors get? I'm a fan of the MCT-340E as well and use them on entry and interior doors with no issues, but the sensors on my garage doors get a lot colder in the winter. I'd look for something using at least the capacity of a CR2 (like Iris V2's which work fine in all weather) instead of wafer battery if extreme cold is a possibility.
Thanks
My garage probably gets down to 20°F at the door frame. I'm not worried about the cold. Besides I'm more interested in the summer when I leave the back door open to allow the heat to escape through the ceiling vent. I also have an alarm system connected to that door and is hard wired, so this sensor is just to tell me its open so I can close it before dark else critters might come in.
This is very true. I had an MCT-340E on a metal screened door on a porch and it would go 6 months of the year without a battery change during spring to fall, but during winter require a fresh battery every 3 weeks or so.
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