SmartThings Motion Sensor continually triggering in HE

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#1

Hi everyone. I have SmartThings motion sensors (v3, I believe) in HE that has begun continually triggering motion. About 6 months ago all of my ST motions started doing this, so I replaced batteries, removed them from HE, re-paired them, etc. and everything was fine until a couple of days ago when one of the motions started exhibiting the problem again.

Any ideas on what causes this? It seems like they just spontaneously decide to exhibit this behavior. nothing else in the environment or HE has changed. The HE logs look totally normal as if they're registering motion detected events every 30 seconds or so.

If this is not resolvable, then I'd be open to suggestions on better replacement battery motion sensors...

Thanks!

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#2

Suspicious. My entire home is ran on these sensors 25+ and they're usually pretty solid. I've not witnessed what you're reporting here but I'll keep an eye out.

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#3

I get this with the V2? square sensors with the 2450 batteries.
Only happens when the battery is too low and they keep triggering every 30-60 seconds. Every 6 months is about what I get.

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#4

This is also the only time I've seen this (not unique to the ST sensors; any Zigbee sesnor seems to do this, or at least a few different manufacturers' motion and contact sensors I've seen do...spurious open/close or active/inactive events as the battery dies).

That being said, it sounds like you only got 6 months of battery life, which sounds pretty bad to me (most of my larger batteries last a couple years; probably less for this coin cell, but that still doesn't sound great).I'd hit "configure" on the device just to make sure reporting is configured correctly, even though that should have happened on pairing (if it paired with the current driver), otherwise maybe you do have something else going on.

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#5

Yes, my busy place like hallways, main bedroom and bathrooms typically jam out around 6 months. I am using Amazon sources cells though as I refuse to pay 5-8.00 store prices for each!

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#6

The unit is a rounded square and uses a Lithium 3V CR2 battery. That seems like such a strange behavior to me if it's related to low battery. A little like saying, "Well, I'm out of gas so I guess I'll just keep my revs really high!" LOL

If that's indeed the case, then I'll try changing the battery and seeing how it goes. On theory I have is that the low battery level is a RESULT of this behavior, not the other way around. Because I have 2 identical sensors with essentially identical traffic (the second one may even have more traffic) and the batteries were both replaced at the same time (6 months ago when this happened to both units) and currently, the affected one I posted about is showing 25% battery in HE and the other is 87%. So, I'm not entirely sure what to think of that. In theory, they should be degrading at about the same rate. So possibly the spurious triggers started and then it just drained the battery... versus being triggered BY low battery?

Agreed. I wouldn't say it's located in a high-traffic area. but maybe even 20-30 triggers a day could be considered high.

#7

FWIW, I use Battery Junction after lots of bad experiences with Amazon (a CR2 is not the same as a CR123A...), but now that Amazon has house brands for some of these, I trust it a bit more. :slight_smile:

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#8

For thread archival, I just replaced the battery right now and seems like the false reporting has stopped. I'll watch the HE logs for another 15 mins or so and update this comment with status.

[A very long 15 mins later]
So far, no false reports.

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#9

Ah yes, I think V3 is a rounded square where as the V2's I have are square rounded :rofl: I don't have any CR2 batteries in any device anymore.

#10

Slightly off topic, but I bought a bunch of rechargeable CR2 batteries for those sensors recently (I have one in almost every room as they are very responsive!). I have just replaced a battery with one of the rechargeable ones last week - will be interesting to see how long it lasts! It’s rating is pretty good at 880mAh. Got them from AliExpress as the price was much better than from Amazon.

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