I've commented several times on the ST forums about their crap engineering and about how their recessed z-wave door sensors tend to get their state wrong on occasion- Sensor says open when door is closed or vice versa. The device has ONE JOB and it can't even do that correctly, rendering it less than useless, but it gets worse!
To install these things you have to drill large holes in your door jambs, so if I were to remove them, I'd have to do something about the damn hole. Bad enough, but hey, here's another thing these brilliant "engineers" didn't think of. Most door jambs are made of wood and wood swells. Of course being cheap hacks, they made the case of their device out of thin plastic that isn't strong enough to resist this pressure so that now that I've removed the guts of the device to change the battery and re-pair it to HE, it won't slide back in because the case has deformed in the jamb.
Save yourself the trouble and never buy anything from these incompetent morons.
I have 8 of them, for several years, and I haven't had the "won't slide back in" problem... yet.
Yes, I do have just remove the guts to change battery, but they've all slid back in easily. I suspect it's my wobbly drilling skills yielding a fractionally bigger hole than spec.
Well, after a bit of jiggering I got it back in. Also the sun came out, so maybe that helped.
Now to see if it still works. The only place to push it back in with is the button, so I just spent about 10 minutes mashing it.
Nope. Not effing working. It paired with HE but shows as status "UNKNOWN" and now state from Generic Z-wave contact sensor.
Tried to reset and pair again and now it doesn't pair at all. All the helpful manual has to say is:
Reset your sensor.
At some stage, you may wish to reset all of
your Recessed Door Sensor’s settings to their
factory defaults. To do this, press and hold the
Action Button for 20 seconds and then release
it. Your sensor will now be reset to its original
settings.
I see you've had a couple of edits already. It might be advisable to give it a third go and back off on some of the phrasing in your last sentence. Just my opinion.
I get that we now live in a culture where "anger" is the worst emotion anybody can ever express, but in my view it actually has value. A culture where the expression of anger is dis-allowed is a culture where incompetence thrives, and everybody is just secretly angry about THAT all the time anyway.
The pipe bomb bit was a joke, FYI. Just a bit of fantasy.
I really am done with these sensors though. And I really do have to fill in the damn holes they left. Another project on the list...
I hear your frustration. I have 2 surface mount sensors and they are not reliable either but blaming for the way it mounts is kind of weird. I usually read the spec and dimension before buying it.
Their motion sensor is not the greatest either but I love their micro and Nano light modules.
Climbing up to remove the fixtures to re-include 5 of the nano modules is my next task, and one that I'm dreading as much as this one.
The fact is that in the same amount of time I've spent messing with these aeotec door sensors, I transitioned 25 other devices over to my HE network from ST. Even if they worked, I'd still consider them a failure.
As for blaming the mount, I was happy to mount them permanently under the assumption that they were engineered well enough to be a permanent solution. They're not. They're crap. They're not built to withstand their operating environment as evidence by the fact that, of the 3 I have, one is squished, and another fell apart.
Shame on me for trusting these guys enough to drill holes in my door jambs. It won't happen again.
I have just transferred 6 of the in door sensors from Smartthings to a Hubitat hub. They have all been running faultlessly for over a year. I changed the batteries for good measure.
Other motion sensors, minimotes, controllers and even the z-wave stick have all found good use in my system and have better behaviors than several other manufacturers devices. IMO.
Just thought it was worth setting the balance here.
The recessed door sensor design isn't exclusively Aeotec's idea. There are Monoprice recessed door sensors that use the same concept. I have two of them and they work just fine.
Yeah the micros weren't too bad. It only took 3-4 tried to get ea to pair up, but the behavior seemed backwards from the instructions. That is, I pressed the button on the device to exclude it, and then toggled the switch 10x to get it to join HE. The instructions suggest it should be the other way around.
Also frankly 2 out of 3 of the recessed door sensors ended up "working". Working in quotes because I suspect they'll still have the intermittent wrong state problem. I never could get them to join in insecure mode.
What finally seemed to work was resetting by holding the button for 20 sec, until they were just flashing red, indicating un-paired. I then removed the batt for several minutes, put it back in and double clicked to join. If I didn't remove the batt and wait a double click would just start the lazy un-paired flash again. Waiting a few minutes then double tapping caused it to join again.
After the device joined it still doesn't work, at least initially. It reported state but the state wouldn't change. Waiting 20-45 minutes and eventually 2 of them started reporting state correctly. As for the third, the button broke off so it seems to be toast. I tried shorting across the traces with a wire to simulate the button but it didn't work.
If they'd just seriously document some of these behaviours it would go a long way towards mitigating my impression of their product.
The micros generally work OK, but I also seem to recall some dumb annoyances with those as well. Something like... you couldn't wire them with standard 14 gauge cuz it wouldn't fit, so I had to go find some other non-standard jumpers to wire them up with? It was something like that. Just silly oversights. You collect enough of those oversights and gotchas in one product and my impression of the company behind it goes down the toilet.
This is my house and I'll eat the time to get this stuff working, but I'd never use their products in an install I had to support. I just think an actual product you're selling to people needs to be BETTER than this.
I also have a couple of multi-sensor 6's and seem to recall spending hours trying to get those tuned correctly to not eat through batteries as well. Eventually I gave up and hard wired them with usb.
You are so right ... this does take time and effort to get to know the ins and outs of the various protocols and devices.
Each new piece of equipment comes with a new set of challenges.
the fundamentals of building a good mesh network and reading the instructions carefully yield enormous benefits - along with patience and experience!
The majority of this stuff is hardly mainstream consumer ready - hence so many pros making money from high end installs.
If you want to be at the bleeding edge of IOT then you will have a few cuts and bruises unless you can pay the premium. Hubitat and any similar device is probably not for you - yet.
Yeah I agree with you about Multi-sensors, They seem decent enough if powered. They are kinda slow - but with usb power + custom driver you can up the refresh rate etc.
My 4 recessed door sensors (all on exterior doors) have been working really well over 4 years and through the ST to HE migration. I may have had some flakiness on one of them but that could have been the z-wave network and ST - working fine under HE.
Micro switches have been reliable over that time as well though I did get one or two "out of the box" failures from Amazon which was disappointing. Docs are terrible - never quite figured out 3-way. Haven't tried their newer switches yet.
All in all I am happy with the Aeotec products I've used so will consider their stuff in the future.
You can press once on the module or 10x on the external switch. They are the same. You can do the button on the module which is much easier but the purpose of pressing the 10x on the switch is for not able to have access to the module.
Well after i got everything somewhat stable I felt a bit bad about bad mouthing aeotec... until this morning that is when my furnace wouldn't come on. Turns out one of my aeotec door sensors is stuck open again (I have a rule to prevent running the hvac when doors or windows are open).
In this case it appears the battery is dead. Funny given that I replaced it the same day I started this thread, so 21d for battery life? Thanks again aeotec.
