Hi. I have a Bilco (basement) door which I've been known to leave open.
If it ever rains, I'll be in very big trouble as I just finished my basement and it will flood.
One option is to get a leak sensor but that area tends to get damp regardless.
Question: I'm thinking of mounting a Contact Sensor to the inside of these doors to help alert if the weather ever suddenly starts to rain. I don't have a compatible PWS, but I do have DarkSky installed which could possibly send me a notification. I'm also open to other weather-reporting suggestions.
Is there a way to have the contact sensor alert me if:
Door is left open and it is about to rain.
Door is left open between 11 pm to 6 am for extended period of time
If so, how could I go about implementing this rule?
There are a couple of weather integrations available via HPM. I used weather-dot-gov for a while. It never actually told me if it WAS raining, more if it was likely to rain. But perhaps that is sufficient. Or how about an outdoor water sensor placed strategically? This might work well as a rain indicator if you can find (or create) somewhere water collects (preferably other than your basement floor). Maybe some sort of funnel shaped container outside somewhere? Or you could get a weather station that had HE integration but that would be a larger investment and a more complex integration.
RM will certainly do it as long as you can find an integration or sensor to tell you whether it's raining. I would also consider either an audible alert (I generally use Echo Speaks) or a text message (Twilio) or both.
What I would do is set up a rule that triggers on the door being open, then a conditional would check to see if your water sensor is wet and raise holy hell if it is.
For the second (door open too long) I would just use the Notification app, which is pretty simple to set up (but harder to get a screen shot). It allows you to specify how long said device is open before notifying. It also allows you to set restrictions by time of day, and it will send text or audio notifications to devices of your choosing. Here's an example from my own system.
