I am another who uses it, and I have 6 of them on my C-7. I use it to detect the switch to battery event, which indicates that there has been a power fail.
One is on the same circuit as the freezer in our garage, and lets me know if the GFI has tripped (the freezer is on the same circuit as an outlet on our patio, and, on occasion during extreme storms, the GFI has tripped, causing the freezer to lose power).
Others are around the house. I have a rule that monitors them and, when a bunch go to battery and stay on battery for a couple of minutes, I do an orderly shutdown of the C-7, which is on a UPS. The reason that I watch for more than one to see power fail is to protect against an accidental knocking of one of them out of the wall socket, as has been known to happen, thereby preventing shutting the C-7 down when there is not a power fail. There is a problem when the C-7 comes back up after power is restored - the "return to mains" event has been missed by the C-7, because the Ring Extenders power up before the C-7 has rebooted. To handle this, I refresh all of the Ring Extenders in a systemStart rule so that their correct power source is seen by their drivers.
My experience with V1 is that a momentary blip will not cause it to report a change to battery, even though the blip was enough to reset my microwave, clocks etc. I have a V2 in my toybox, but haven't tried it yet.
From my experience with the V2 I'd have to agree. A momentary disruption of power caused by removing and reinserting the extender does not change its state. But for my purposes, it works fine.
I switched from an AC UPS to a DC UPS and I get hours out of that. It does not have to convert to the From DC to AC to DC which uses up most of the UPSes battery. I also use the same supply for the Internet router.
I just got an extender essentially to do mains power monitoring (with the extender piece as a side benefit). It paired fine but I am not seeing any change in the "powerSource" attribute when I pull out the plug. Left it out for a couple of minutes but saw no change on the device page and no entry in the log. I did see the "battery" attribute change from 88% to 98% and I can see that in the logs as well as in the device events.
HE firmware - 2.3.1.142, C-5 using the HE provided Ring Alarm Range Extender driver.
Any help/guidance would be appreciated. Thanks!
UPDATE: Switched from the HE driver to the driver by @dennypage and I can now see the powerSource attribute change. Is there a known issue with the built in driver?
(1) I stopped using the HE built-in driver because, at some point about a year ago, the Refresh command stopped working with the Ring Extender V2 on one of the HE firmware updates . I raised the issue several times but it never got fixed. Search the forum and you will find my posts.
(2) I switched to Denny Page’s (@dennypage’s) driver for the Ring Extender V2 because Refresh works on his driver. His driver works perfectly, I have not had any issues. I do not know whether the Hubitat built-in driver for the Ring Extender V2 was ever fixed in recent months; I have not seen any indication of a fix in Release Notes.
(3) the reason Refresh was needed is that, when power fail occurs, I have a set of voting rules that looks at the power failures that occur on the six Ring Extender V2 devices I have and determines if it’s a “real” power fail or if one of the Ring Extenders just failed (hardware failure) or if someone (e.g., my wife) knocked the Ring Extender V2 out of the wall socket. The rules are a bit subtle and handle the “flapping” of the power up and down as the utility company tries to self-heal the grid during a power outage, and handle the up-down simultaneous events from the Ring Extenders V2 during power fail. If the power stays down for a few minutes (determined by the voting rules), which is shorter than the battery time of my UPS devices, then the voting rule shuts the Hub down with a clean shutdown. The real problem is on power restoration because the Ring Extender V2 devices power up before the Hub, so the Hub (and the Ring Extender V2 driver) misses the “return to mains” event from the Ring Extender V2, so the driver thinks the Ring Extender is still on battery. This could be handled by a Refresh in a systemStart triggered rule, but that requires Refresh to work in the Ring Extender V2 driver. I posted about this a while back, and Denny Page enhanced his driver so that it automatically schedules a Refresh when the Hub reboots and initializes the drivers, which means that the ,mains/battery state is always correct with his driver. From what you are describing, though, it does not sound like a refresh issue. However, it may be a driver issue, but maybe not.
(4) Denny Page’s driver is here, but it can also be found in Hubitat Package Manager:
(5) my Ring Extender V2 devices are on my C-7 production Hub, paired S2. I have never used them on my C5 development hub, which does not support S2. There has been extensive discussion in the forum whether the Ring Extender V2 works properly if not paired S2. The writer of the Hubitat built-in driver (Bryan Copeland) has reported that he couldn’t get it to work unless it was paired S2. Others have disputed that requirement. I don’t know the answer. It shouldn’t matter for a repeater whether it is paired S2, S0, or none, because the packets it repeats are just bits, and it just repeats the bits without decrypting and re-encrypting. But some repeaters might care about encryption for commands to the repeater itself and status reports back. I just don’t know, but I toss out that possibility.
(6) you say your Ring Extender V2 “paired fine”. I’m not sure what that means. You might try switching to Denny Page’s driver to see if that changes anything and seeing if the Extender responds to commands from his driver. Hit Configure after switching drivers.
(7) if you want to see my voting rules for the Ring Extender V2 devices, just ask. The complexity of voting is not needed if you only have one Ring Extender,
Yep - had just done this before I saw your reply and that is working fine.
All my rules logic is in Node-RED and I am already monitoring the "systemStart" event to do a bunch of stuff. I guess I can just add a "refresh" for Ring Extender to update the attribute.
My current solution for power outage and restore is to monitor two devices with static IPs that are not on a UPS (my hub is on a UPS). I still have to think through how to "restart" the hub if the UPS still has battery and the power comes back on since HE will not reboot automatically.
The Node-RED solution restarts the hub (it is connected to the UPS via a Kasa wifi plug) when Node-RED is able to ping the static IP device. If the UPS runs out of battery, then HE would restart on its own when the power comes back. With the Ring Extender, I can monitor outage but not sure how to monitor when it comes back on and HE is shut down.
Do you have a solution for the 1st use case? The only devices that use IP addresses and are not on a UPS are 2 Harmony Hubs and I'm trying to eliminate that dependency as I don't use Harmony any longer.
I believe I have seen such a solution in the forum involving a WiFi or microcontroller (rpi ?) controlled outlet that powers the hub, with the outlet having some sort of auto off/on with settable delay. The outlet is plugged into the UPS, the hub is plugged into the outlet, and you can power cycle the outlet to cause the hub to reboot.
Yes - that is exactly what my current solution does. The trick is to find a trigger that initiates the auto off and then on for the wifi Kasa plug that HE is plugged in to. I think I will be able to replace the first part of my current solution and eliminate the periodic pings to the IP devices to initiate a shut down but will likely have to stay with the 2nd half of the solution that monitors an IP device to check if it is back on line. I do have a 2nd Kasa wifi plug but it does not "push" events (I have to poll to see if it is on or off).
@dennypage@672southmain - I'm seeing some strange behavior that I wanted to check with you. The powerSource attribute is not changing until I hit "refresh" on the device page.
Is this expected behavior? Is there a "delay"between when the power state changes and when it is sent to HE? I haven't changed any of the default settings for the device driver (see below) but let me know if something needs to be changed?
For troubleshooting Z-Wave or a device driver issue, I would look at the Hubitat only. Involving another system like Node-RED isn't going to help, and it may have a different idea of time than the Hubitat.
The communication from the Ring RE2 to the Z-Wave hub is immediate. Look on the Hubitat device Events tab and/or the log to see timestamps from the Hubitat point of view. Turn on debug logging to see more information.
One thing to note about the Hubitat device Edit page is that it can go stale. If you are looking at that page and expecting to see the powerSource immediately change under Current States, you need to make sure the web page itself is refreshed prior running the test. Don't switch to another tab or window during the test.
Note also that the Hubitat device Events page does not auto update. You need to refresh the page to see new entries.
I had both open only because I could not see the "trigger" event in HE when I unplugged the Ring Extender. The timestamps are actually identical when the event was registered (11:25:41 AM) after I hit the refresh.
That was the 2nd screenshot. The logs also show the "battery" event at 11:25:41 and then nothing when I plugged it back in.
Yeah - I'm aware of that. Refreshing the web page did not update the powerSource attribute which was why I hit the "Refresh" button.
I wonder if this is an incomplete pairing or mesh issue? I'm on a C-5 so use the "inclusion" process. Also, I have a mains powered Z-Wave switch (UltraPro) about 10ft away (HE is a bit further)
EDIT/UPDATE: The device compatibility page does not list Ring Alarm Range Extender v2 on the compatibility list (only v1 is on the list). However, all the other Ring v2 devices have a qualifier of "C-7 Required". Can someone from HE (@bobbyD@support ) confirm if this device will work with a C-5? If not, I can still return it....Thanks.
I'm having trouble excluding this from my C-5. I've tried through the "Remove Device" and through the "Z-Wave Exclusion" process. The instructions (for the v1) say to press the button on the right side of the device, but that is not working.
I have also tried the following steps from the Ring support site:
What if I need to remove my Range Extender(1st gen and 2nd gen)?
In the Ring app, tap Menu , then tap Devices , then tap Alarm Base Station , then tap the Range Extender you wish to remove.
Tap the Gear icon on the top right corner, then tap Remove .
Unplug the Range Extender and then plug it back in.
Wait a few seconds and if nothing happens then press and release the button on the right hand side.
The app will let you know the device was removed. Leave the Range Extender unplugged until ready to use again.
Any suggestions on next steps? If I do a force exclude, will that mess up my Z-Wave mesh?
