Previously, I had Samsung Smart Things Water/Leak Sensor and it worked flawlessly. Batteries lasted over 1 year and never had issue with signal/inaccurate battery readings/etc in my old house.
Now I have the Hubitat setup in my new house with 20 Zooz water leak sensors and the cell batteries are not lasting, the signal isn’t consistent/reporting regularly and I am trying to figure out if it is a system setup issue or if these really suck.
Does anybody have any suggestions how to isolate the issues? Any reports of these sucking down battery and poor function? I went through all of them today and tripped the moisture sensors to check the battery life/test the signal.
About 25% needed new batteries after 2 months.
Could it be that I don’t have enough repeaters and that is draining the battery/affecting the signal? Yes.
Could it be that these are junk products? You tell me.
That is why I am asking for your feedback. It is either that my system is messed up or these don’t work very well.
First guess would be not enough repeaters with that many devices. Which, given they're z-wave...ogiewon's probably more on the right path. You could still post your z-wave details page.
Mine is paired with S2 which may use more battery than no security. It has been going for almost exactly a year on the original OE battery and still reporting 100%.
I have an app that checks daily for activity (within past 14 hours for sensors) and I don't recall this one ever coming up, which means it is reporting in every 12 hours every day like it is supposed to.
I do have a whole house full of zwave switches although not a ton in this corner by the kitchen sink. It usually routes through a switch on the other side of the kitchen.
I just recently added a second one in the upstairs bathroom which has even worse routing options, but so far its been working good. Too early to know about battery life on that one.
If you end up wanting to replace them or try an alternate product, the Centralite leak sensors are the same form factor as the Samsung. They don't have sensors on both the top and the bottom like Samsung did, they just have them on the bottom. But they're very nice.
Centralite Water Leak Sensor - Monitors Your Whole Home for Leaks - Detects Water Leaks in the Kitchen, Bathroom, Basement, Or Laundry Room - Works With Smartthings, Hubitat, Ezlo, Vera, and Zigbee https://a.co/d/h6GMkVI
Before you replace them check the firmware version and update them. I have the zooz water, contact, and temperature sensors and have seen issues that were resolved with newer firmware versions an each of them.
To summarize:
when first released it was noted that devices were sending a lot of batter reports. This was with the original firmware. A fix was put in place and a newer firmware was release.
I personally have seen devices just splurting out massive amounts of commands randomly. I have my own drivers that record the number of events coming from a device so I can monitor things like this. I saw with the water sensors they would randomly spit out up to 800 messages in the course of 30 minutes randomly through the day. I have updated the firmware on all of them and I haven't seen this issue since. As a bonus ever since fixing this my zwave network has been solid and I no longer get those moments of "slight delay" randomly.
also ensure that their wake up interval isn't too low. It should be something like 43200. This basically means that the device will wake up ever 12 hours just to "check in". If that is set too low that would contribute to the battery drain. I think you can confirm this value on the device page.
The sad part though is that updating the firmware will probably drain the battery too as the device will need to stay awake the whole time to recieve the new battery which is not the fastest process. We just can't win.
Hopefully this helps. And to add, I don't think they are junk products. In my case they just needed some firmware updates. But they work well and at least support released the updates.
Contact zooz support. You will need to register for their support site (just checked and you can't access it without an account). Once registered all of their available firmware updates are there for download. Most have change logs but a number of them don't.
I've spent a good chunk of time updating their firmware on my devices. In the end it was worth it because of the issues I pointed out above.
Seems to happen less often recently. I dont think at all with the 700 chip devices.
I have noticed on some the Association Group 1 gets cleared, which tells the device the node of the hub to send reports to. When this happens it appears to be unresponsive but a lot of times if you run a configure it will fix it. I am actually thinking this is what was happening all along and the devices do not get factory reset, just the association gets cleared.
Interesting - I only have one Zooz device that came w/updated FW so I've no personal experience. If their newer devices update w/out reset/causing issues that's good to hear. @erktrek, you have a ton of experience w/Zooz - are you seeing the same?
Good to know this. Samsung's version is an absolute tank - batteries last forever, top & bottom leak detection (both work well) and temp reporting too. I'm glad Aeotec is keeping the design around -- it's a very good device!
I have quite a few Zooz devices and have been doing lots of firmware updates lately. Here's what I've learned so far.
If your device is paired with S2, remove and repair it without any security before updating the firmware. It's multiple orders of magnitude quicker to update their devices without S2 enabled. Some of their devices(zen52) need to be factory reset after the firmware update. Some will update but not reflect the new firmware version in HE until they are reset.
Summary:
remove security before updating firmware
resetting the zooz device after a firmware update is a good idea
The Swap Apps Device & Z-Wave Details pages in HE make replacing the reset devices in your automations a lot less painful.
The Samsung Smarthings Water/Leak Sensor is a Zigbee device. I think you should consider a Zigbee replacement for all the devices that are not one hop away from the hub.
T-Shirt?!
