I have 6 Aeotec Recessed Door Sensor 7 Z-Wave Plus sensors. All work fine; however, only by luck have I caught a few with low batteries before they quit working and falsely trigger an open contact. When they start getting low on batteries, I notice a solid red light, check battery levels via Hubitat and see only 100%, yet take a multimeter to them and they're just shy of dead.
Looked around to others and find batteries at 1.10v (1.5v battery) yet still are reporting 100%. This prevents some polling to head off a battery failure before alerts due to a false open contact start firing.
My other battery powered devices, all Phillips brand, report accurate battery levels fine.
I've installed Device Watchdog in hopes that may somehow poll the devices and get a valid value, but no luck.
Finally, I attempted to use the Device Firmware updater and going from 1.04 to 1.05 firmware. I can get the updater to see a unit, report back its current firmware, select the 1.05 firmware, say it's starting the update process; however, it never progresses / nothing happens. Moved the devices to 6" from the hub with no change in behavior.
Any suggestions on getting a valid battery level from the Aeotec devices and how to make the firmware updater work (if 1.05 fixes this) is much appreciated.
Thanks for your feedback. I don't have this particular device, but our Z-Wave engineer has it, so he'll check on the battery reporting. I wanted to mention that changelogs for 1.05 update only mentions a fix for Supervision CC session ID when paired with S2 Authentication. While that may be beneficial, unfortunately, you cannot use the Aeotec provided gbl file with Device Firmware updater. You will need a hex file if you'd like to use the Device Updater.
I have a number of zigbee contact sensors which also report temperature.
It seems that although they report at 100%, my multimeter shows that they are way down.
It appears to me that Device Activity Check is the only "real" way to see if a battery powered device is "still on the ranch" (and has some battery life left).
OP here... Out of the blue, I had a few contact sensors report levels below 100 this morning.
One was the Aeotec Recessed Door Sensor 7, using that specific driver in HE. The other was generic door and window sensor (Ecolink DWZWAVE2.5-ECO) that I made into a gate contact, using the HE "Generic Z-Wave Contact Sensor".
I had them polled daily using the Device Watchdog app. The Aeotec sensor reported 60 and triggered the app report. However, I look at it about an 90 min later and HE reports the battery at 80. (It was about 17F when the 60 was reported, about 27F when I looked in HE.)
That made me check all the others -- they were all at 100 except the one generic sensor reporting a 90.
I don't know if this is device calibration issue that can't be fixed by HE -- i.e. a 100 = means a voltage battery level from say 50-100%, 99 is 45-50%, 80 = 25%, etc... Meaning the values seen in HE are skewed way low -- by the time the battery reads off 100, the battery is about to die and no further updates are going to occur.
Whatever the case, it was good news to actually get a heads-up via daily polling that a battery was about to die...
What I am taking from this: Use the Watchdog app to check them daily, along with last activity, and together one may head off a surprise dead battery... Not exactly confidence inspiring, but better than where I was just heading off a dead battery by dumb luck...
One other thought: I may change the logic around to Report Close when Magnet is OPEN to head off alarms going off for no reason when the contact is still closed but the battery just died rapidly somehow... That's the scenario that had me start down this road -- on vacation, start getting weird alerts, wondering what's going on, having to disable stuff guessing what's going on but not knowing for sure....
