My Dome Water Valve DMWV1 keeps going Inactive. I have a z-wave repeater in the basement at the edge of the door and the valve is about 30 ft from the repeater and the repeater is about the same distance to the HE hub.
Anyone know of a reason why it would keep doing this or has anyone experienced this device disconnecting? thanks
So I am not going to be very helpful.. I own a dome and I thought it was fine until your post then realized I hadn't re-included it under my new hub setup..
I just did and will let you know. It showed up quickly and everything appears to be functioning properly. My main hub is in the basement about 15 ft away.
It is a very nice device even if or especially since I haven't had to use it very much!
You might try an additional repeater - something like 4 hops is the max for Z-Wave.
Yeah the dang thing works great as long as it stays connected. Yes please let me know if it disconnects. Might not since it is so close to the hub. I am not sure how many hops it is taking I haven't looked at that yet.
Also run a z-wave repair..(you probably already did this).
As an aside - I just switched to a 2 hub setup (one for basement/main floor and one for upstairs) and things have been working really well so far.
@csteele is using 3 - upstairs/downstairs and a controller for apps and such.. If you are thinking about buying another repeater device you might want to consider another hub instead and change things around.
I probably should put another unit downstairs. The valve is the only unit down there except for battery devices. I am going to run a repair too just for grins. thanks
Are you referring to the status changing to inactive or is the device completely unresponsive?
EDIT: I wrote this whole thing and then re-read that you meant water valve, not water leak sensor. Still, I suspect the below is applicable to most Z-Wave devices (and maybe some ZigBee ones too) that aren't very "chatty."
I'd also be curious about the above question. Mine [EDIT: leak sensor, not valve] routinely shows "INACTIVE" in the Hubitat device list, but I think that's simply because it's not very chatty on the Z-Wave network. It hasn't reported a battery level since I installed it (100%), and it only sends wet/dry events as they happen. I'm not sure there's anything else it does to "check in" on a regular basis (e.g., I don't think it does temperature readings, and if it does, Hubitat does not report them)--so battery reports or actual events are probably all we have.
Here are the last three events in my device's event history, for instance--it went "INACTIVE" at some point in here, which I noticed when Device Watchdog (community app) let me know:
Name | Value | Unit | Description Text | Source | Type | Date |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
water | dry | Dome Leak Sensor is dry | DEVICE | 2019-02-08 23:43:25.722 CST | ||
water | wet | Dome Leak Sensor is wet | DEVICE | 2019-02-08 23:43:22.605 CST | ||
water | dry | Dome Leak Sensor is dry | DEVICE | 2019-01-24 00:54:19.808 CST |
I tested it by setting it on a wet towel just now in the same location it has been since i placed the sensor, so I have every reason to believe it is still working as intended, and I'll probably resort to monitoring the battery level (not super-reliable with lithium cells but it's something) and the occasional manual test.
For comparison, a lot of ZigBee water sensors are far more chatty, with many of the newer ones (Z-Wave included, just not this one) also doing temperature readings (quite likely to change and cause the hub to receive messages from it, maintaining "ACTIVE" status). If there is a better way to monitor these staying "on" the network, I'd be curious--but it's quite likely you don't really have anything to worry about here.
I think it is just the status changing to inactive. It will blink a blue LED if it is not connected. So I will ignore it. thanks
Yea I think it is OK as I said above. I would rather it say something like Idle instead of inactive because that can throw you especially if you haven't seen it before. thanks
If you check the Z-Zwave Details screen there's a column for Last Received and I believe that's how you can determine if the device is still online.
Someone else told me about that and I am just not used to using it yet. Still learning. But I will go look there, so thanks.