Here's kind of a weird one. I have a contact sensor on my entry door. When the contact is changes to close it will trigger my zwave lock to lock the door. This has been working good but lately, I've been having some issues with this contact sensor (zigbee) falling off network. I have to run a zigbee discover to get it back on.
I was thinking of using a motion sensor instead. Not sure if this is even possible. I know I can just get another contact sensor but I have a ton of iris motion sensors laying around.
Has anyone used a motion sensor in this case? If so, how are you setting this up?
You can use almost anything to trigger locking a door. Turning on a light; sunrise or sunset; motion. The question is would any of those things be practical. It is pretty easy to have a false motion event like a sudden shaft of sunlight or a burst of heat from the heating system. I could envision all sorts of scenarios where someone would get locked out accidentally.
Contact sensors are a little more predictable as a trigger to lock the door.
If your contact sensor is falling off, you should concentrate on building a solid mesh to keep devices from falling off. Just my opinion.
@zarthan I have many zigbee devices. NON of them are having any issues with falling off. Most of them are further away from the hub.
I did read somewhere to make sure my WiFi channel was not the same as the zigbee channel. If my WiFi is set to Auto, select a channel to use far away from the zigbee channel. I just did this. My Zigbee channel is set to 20, I changed my WiFi channel to 1.
Zigbee falling off (if it's a compatible device) is almost certainly either a bad device, a weak battery, a range issue (maybe exaggerated by a weak battery or interfenence from WiFi, which could be a neighbor's WiFi too), or a problem on the mesh by a device like a lightbulb not repeating which (with the exception of Sengled) is why you don't put Zigbee bulbs on your Zigbee network with other devices.
Distance to the hub is not necessarily a guarantee that the device has a good route back to the HE hub. If no other device is having issues, have a look at where your powered devices (not battery powered) are. You may need to move a powered or plug in device closer. What device is the contact sensor (make and model)?
How many battery powered zigbee devices do you have? And how many line-powered ones? (not including non-repeating line-powered devices like Sengled bulbs/outlets).
A quick search of the forum tells me you have been having issues with this sensor since the beginning, but not with other devices. I'd dump it personally. There's lots of good devices out there and they're not that expensive. The Samsung Multi-sensors for example are often on sale for under $20 as they are right now.
Although I will say that I’m completely unable to tell you how long their batteries normally last. I have two of those exact SmartThings Multisensors, but I’ve converted both to be triggered by contacts closing and both are converted to run off a 5v power adapter. But, they do not drop off the network and one of them is in my basement, shrouded by a lot of unavoidable metal.
You’ll see in the post I linked to above, that one of the reasons I converted both to mains power was that I experienced a dead battery 24 hours after my hack. I’m sure my connection of relay dry contacts to the hall sensor caused this, because that would obviously never fly as an off-the-shelf product if the battery died that fast. I’ve not seen others here complaining about their battery life, so you shouldn’t have any trouble either.
