Hello everyone, I have only had my Hubitat for about 5 days but so far it appears to have cured most of the pains I felt with SmartThings. I had created a lot of customization with ST and have most of them ported over. What's everyone doing for battery monitoring on battery powered sensors? Running the MQTT bridge and capturing/logging battery levels with Node Red works well, but the battery reporting is a bit sporadic. I know that z-wave is pesky in this area, but my zigbee devices are doing the same thing. Anyone know a way to actively poll some of these battery powered devices periodically?
The real issue I've found, is some my devices always report 100% until they die. I do have HSM set to send alerts on low battery. My most important battery devices do report battery level consistently, those being my fire/co alarms and my door locks.
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I use a custom HSM monitoring rule for batteries. I also have a dashboard with all my battery devices. Between those two I am covered.
I've got the same as @ritchierich, a dashboard with all my battery reporting devices. One quick glance shows me all of them at once.
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It has been a year and I still have this on every single battery operated device.
I am testing a new method that so far seems to be working great. After the Hubitat guys introduced HTTP posting, I realized that there is a pretty rich flow of data coming out of the hub. I used Node Red to capture post events from the hub. By capturing the device ID and doing an easy SQL current time stamp for each device that talks, you can keep track of the last time your device communicated. My devices like the iris contact sensors check in randomly with temperature data so if I don't hear from one for a while, I trigger a battery alert. For your devices that don't check in automatically, you can issue a refresh/info command to it periodically and it should respond back. I like the passive monitoring because I feel like I am not reducing the battery life with constant polling. At least with this method, I won't have sensors that are rarely used sitting there with a dead battery for days on end before I realize it.
I use a similar approach to feed MySQL table via NodeRed for battery updates. I have a last updated column I update via database trigger if any other update happens on battery devices. This was I know when it’s dead or fallen off mesh. NodeRed sends me a pushover message if it hasn’t updated in 24 hours.
