Hi - I'm hoping someone can help with this. Apologies for the long winded post that explains the requirement, reason as well as my problem.
I'm looking for either:
A - a small battery only Z wave device that will accept a wired dry contact input - open going closed.
B - a Z wave door contact that has a traditional, old school, magnetic reed switch (glass tube type) Without me having to buy multiple items to pull to bits and check!
The reason:
I wanted to monitor the standard multipoint and deadlock bolts on my uPVC doors. These are used in my dashboards so I can see at a glance if the door has been locked (without incessantly checking the handle on each before I go to bed). I have installed a lever microswitch in the doorframe keep of each door. Three of them are no issue - I've connected them directly to my Honeywell Dimension alarm system and have added them to HE via the rather excellent beta MQTT integration posted on this forum - all working. The fourth one however is a set of bi fold doors so I've no way, of cabling to the switch in the keep and all wiring must remain on the individual door panel.
I thought about using a Fibaro Smart Implant powered by battery. This would work but I'm not sure how long the battery would last and as it is a repeating device, it has the potential to cause issues when the battery starts to fail.
I got it working for a time with a Neo Coolcam contact, positioned in the recess of the door panel. This does not have a standard glass tube reed switch but I found on PCB there were a pair of contacts that went from infinite resistance down to 18 Ohms when the magnet was moved into place. Shorting/ un-shorting these contacts did send a close/open signal and I connected the microswitch to them (via 30 ohms of resistance). However when shorted it is slowly discharging the battery - dropping the voltage 0.001 volts every 5 seconds (CR2 battery dropped below threshold in 48 hours). With a meter I can see that standard operation draws current only briefly when the contact is opened/closed but while shorted there's a permanent draw of 40mA. So I need a more "standard" contact to perform the same mod on. Neo Coolcam PCB is shown below.
Ecolink’s z-wave contact sensors used to have wire terminals, but I’m not sure if the newer z-wave plus sensors do as well. Cheaper than aeotec (what brand isn’t? ), so might be worth looking into.
Thanks - will take a look. The Aeotec one is ÂŁ45 plus carriage on Vesternet, nothing doing on Amazon. My Neo Coolcam one was only ÂŁ18. I don't have any Zigbee kit so I'd rather not use it but I've ordered a Sonoff to take a look at from Amazon. I can have a quick look to see whether it is butcher-able before returning it if I think it won't work.
In the end I’ve ordered the Aeotec ZWC007 that @672southmain recommended. Although expensive, it’s Z wave as preferred and it’ll arrive today. I had some points I could redeem on Vesternet that discounted the cost by around 30 per cent
Well it's arrived and doesn't work! Mine is the ZWA-008. It has included with the Aeotec Door Window Sensor 7 Series driver. I can only get it to work with the magnet. I have changed the preferences to use the external input rather than the internal switch and hit configure but it keeps using the magnet and reports nothing when I short/un-short the terminals.
Edit: It works. The instructions are hopeless. When I link to the device on the Aeotec site it brings up a different part number and the ZWA-008 C is listed as discontinued. The issue was that I needed to do a single click of the tamper switch after configure to set the preferences. Also needed to change the open/close to the wrong way round in order to make it report close when shorted, open when open.
The issue is that this is a battery-powered device, and it goes to sleep unless it has something to report (open/close, tamper, battery report). Because it is asleep, it cannot respond to parameter settings. All battery-powered devices behave this way. Look at the Z-Wave details page, you will see it marked “PENDING” to indicate that parameter update is pending. To get it to save parameter updates, you have to wake it up by hitting the tamper switch, then saving parameters. This is described in the User Guide that is online at the Aeotec site. It stays awake for 30 sec or so, I believe.
I also turned off the LED indicator to lengthen battery life.
Glad you got it working.
), so might be worth looking into.
