I just wanted to let people know how I used a Ring Alarm Range Extender to send a power out alert.
I've been searching for a while on how to use Hubitat to send me an alert when the power went out. There has been discussion, here in the community, on how to integrate the Ring Alarm Range Extender into Hubitat and also of using it as a power out alert, which helped pointing me in the right direction. So here's a procedure to set up an alert.
NOTE: First of all, please note this only works if your WiFi and Hubitat Hub continues to work after power is lost. Therefore, you need to use some type of UPS to provide power to your network when the power went out. This wasn't that bad for me, since I had all my network power supplied by a power strip. So I just plugged the power strip into the back of my existing UPS.
So now the Range Extender will trigger when it switches to battery power, from mains. Then send an alert to your phone and Pushover.
I hope this helps.
NOTE: Another alternative is MySpool for power out alerts, which is independent to Hubitat and send a text message and email when the power goes out is Myspool. I use both of them, just in case one doesn't work. I also will get alerts from Hubitat, Pushover, Text message and Email.
Anyone having issue with the Ring range extender not reporting when it flips back to mains power from the battery? It instantly reports when it flips from mains to battery but then doesn't report when it flips back. I know it's running on mains as the power is on it'll report being on battery for multiple days. If I unplug and plug back in it will report mains power.
The problem is when the hub is powered down during the outage, when it goes back up you will need to have a rule in RM that runs on boot and poles the Ring Extender to know it's state. I believe I read somewhere that @bcopeland would check to see if this could be done directly in the driver but I guess it did not go anywhere (or I'm mistaking). I don't see this because my hub is powered by a battery at all times and unless the power is out for more than 10 hours or so, this will not affect me.
I just added a Ring Extender v2 yesterday. The only way it reads that its on battery is if I go in and hit refresh on the device. Is there anyway to get it to refresh automatically?
Here are my rules. You.simplu add a refresh of the ring in system restart. Mine is the fr extender. The rest are for other stuff like lights that come back on and to get polling going on thermostats.
thanks for the prompt.. just noticed there is something wrong with the driver in this f/w version as all my ring extenders say on battery and they are not i will report it.
used the custom ring extender driver from now that HAS option to create child reporting device and changed to that for now till the problem can be sorted out..
I'm not sure I understand which part is doing the polling. Also, is this only on restart of the of Hubitat or is it always running after Hubitat starts? I set something up similar to the first rule which after Systemstart it refreshes the extender every 10 minutes.
No polling is necessary. There are two unrelated issues.
The first issue is that refresh is broken in the built-in Ring Extender v2 driver. The fix for this is to switch to Denny Page’s (@dennypage’s) driver.
The second issue is that, when a power fail occurs and the hub shuts down, and then later reboots when power returns, the Ring Extender switches from battery to mains before the hub has rebooted, causing the “switch to mains” event to be missed (discarded), so the Ring Extender’s power source state in the driver still indicates that power source is “battery”. The fix for this is to have a Rule triggered on the systemStart location event, and have an action in that rule do a refresh on the Ring Extender. No polling is needed, just that single refresh when the hub boots.
I'm already using the Dennypage driver and still it doesn't refresh. My hub isn't losing power, its on a UPS and my home has a whole home battery backup. I have two rooms that aren't tied into this so I'm just trying to determine when I've lost grid power and failed to battery since its seemless and I never notice. I then will have routines run to turn off non-critical stuff around the house to preserve power when I don't have solar recharging the batteries.
Ok, let’s test methodically. Open the device page for the Ring Extender. Pull the Ring Extender out of the wall socket. Does the powerSource change to battery? Then, put the Ring Extender back into the socket. Does the powerSource change to mains?
The only way to test refresh is to open the device page for the Ring Extender, remove the Ring Extender from the wall socket (observe powerSource change to battery), power your hub down (safely, from Settings, Shutdown), put the Ring Extender back into the wall socket (so the hub misses the switch to mains event), power up your hub, allow it to boot, open up the device page for the Ring Extender, observe that the powerSource is battery (because the change to mains event was missed), hit refresh, observe powerSource change to mains. This assumes that you don’t have any systemStart routine that refreshes the Ring Extender.
Are you saying that if you simulate a power outage by unplugging your Ring Extender (simulating loss of power in one of your non-UPS’d rooms, then plug it back in, that your Ring Extender keeps reporting “power source battery” and does not report “power source mains” (assuming of course that your Hub remains powered all during the test)?
What firmware version are you on (both hub and device)? I am curious as I am on 2.3.1.130 and 1.2.1 and my RE seems to change power source state back and forth virtually instantaneously on my device page without any refresh necessary. I only need to send a refresh when my hub restarts as per @672southmain.
As I was typing this, @672southmain already beat me to it, lol!!! Follow his instructions (and make sure you are actually using Dennypage’s driver as someone in a previous post mistakenly thought they were using his driver when they were actually using the built-in driver).
I'm definitely on the proper driver because it shows the Power Test and Range Test options which aren't on the base driver. I installed it through Hubitat Package Manager and then changed to that driver. My hub is on 2.3.1.141 after the update I installed yesterday.
For testing I just have the Ring Externder V2 plugged into a surge protector that I'm power cycling to simulate power loss till I get it configured. At that point it will be in a room that is not on battery backup of any type. When I turn off the power to it the device page does not change to "battery" unless I hit Refresh on the device commands page. The same happens if I Refresh it to "battery" and then plug it back in. It will not change to "mains" until I do Refresh on the commands page of the device.
This was the same result when I did the test that 672southmain recommended.
I wish that it showed that I click the Refresh command to get these results but this is what I got. Can I just create a rule to check the device every 5-10 minutes?
While you could as a work around, I think there is obviously some other issue going on as you should not have to if everything is working as designed. The device should not have to be “polled” manually in this manner as it changes state based on an event (the switch to battery power or mains).
One other thing you can try that @thebearmay once helped me with in another topic: I was once getting some error messages when I had switched device drivers as one of the characteristics from the old driver stayed “linked” to the device. In your specific case, it may be that the built-in driver with its characteristic of not having the ability to automatically refresh is getting in the way of the Dennypage driver? I was able to fix this by switching my device driver to “device” (without hitting configure), saving then closing the device, then switching the driver from “device” to my new driver (in your case, back to Ring Alarm Range Extender gen2). Then hit configure. I am certainly no expert in this but this worked for me (@thebearmay has bailed me out many times) and it could not hurt to give it a try.
Also check your device pairing via Z-wave (exclude then re-enroll). You can factory reset between exclusion and inclusion by holding a paper clip in the reset hole in the back of the device (the internal battery has to be charged to do this) and pressing for 10 seconds then releasing when the flashing green light stops). Also, I also saw somewhere that it has to be paired using S2. Good luck with this. I remember it being very frustrating for me to even get it to pair initially as the instructions to pair that were given in this community was very confusing with several convoluted steps. I found a link to the official Ring device manual that was very clear and simple (factory reset instructions and pairing in SmartStart and Classic modes) which seemed to help a lot (I was able to get it to pair the first time using these simple and clear instrutions). I will try to find the link and post for you. Hope these suggestions help.
Edit: here’s the link: https://manuals.plus/ring/ring-alarm-range-extender-2nd-generation-manual
I followed the directions from the manual and excluded, factory reset, and then added the device back. It re-added back as Ring Alarm Range Extender gen2. I conducted the test again and received the same result that it doesn't update without the refresh. Does everyone have their "Heartbeat interval in minutes" set to the default 70 minutes? I tried changing this also but didn't help.
