Thanks @jtmpush18, appreciate the follow-up. The Spare Bedroom is off, that's why it's not reporting, but if I turn the light switch on it works so that's not a concern. The concern is the ThirdReality water sensors specifically.
I'm getting notifications from Device Alert that include the water sensors, and I'm assuming when I get an alert that means they have fallen off the network. However, when I test the sensor it seems to work, so not sure why I'm getting the alert, When looking at the logs/events they don't seem to provide much help.
I will order a repeater and try that, seems to be the easiest thing to resolve this, and suppose it can only make the network more robust. Thanks again. I'll report back if that doesn't work.
Bought a thirdreality plug and installed next to the hub but nothing has changed, still getting the same device alerts about the water sensors. Any other suggestions?
Installing next to the hub does not do much good. Install it in a central location so that it can reach those sensors tha the hub is not communicating with.
I installed a second one within a couple feet of the sensor. So now I have the hub, 2 repeaters, and two sensors within about 20 ft with no walls. The sensor under the sink isnât reporting on Device Alert, but the Dishwasher sensor is. Any other thoughts?
Again, using Device Activity Report allows an option to force a refresh before checking the activity (traffic from that specific device) state - Basically the "Last Activity At" field on the device.
I'm not familiar with the "Device Alerts" app, but it sounds like it's checking every 24 hrs, given your statement of getting a daily alert - My Third Reality (TR) Water sensors, typically check in around every 24 hrs (and that's not exact, as I don't think that have a very accurate internal clock). So not sure if you can push the "Device Alerts" alerting interval back to 36 hrs.
Either way, The TR devices are likely indeed staying connected - You can actually test this by changing the device driver type for the device in HE to a generic ZB switch, and turn the device "on" and you'll hear the alert beep. - Obviously switch back to the proper Zigbee water sensor driver, after testing - But, if you can turn the alert beeper on/off, then it's obviously still on the ZB mesh
My suggestion, as I've had problems with the "periodic check-ins" on some devices, is for those with problems, write a quick RM rule to refresh the problem devices, if no attributes activity is seen in "x" hrs (the below uses 34 hrs for the max refresh interval, but you can adjust as needed, given your alerting period). You don't want to just force refresh these things every hour, or you get lousy battery life, but the below "pings" them now and then, automatically, if they haven't had any activity in 34 hrs - Then the existing Device Activity check does the appropiate alerting for anything that's still unresponsive (usually dead batteries). I don't do this on all my TR ZB devices, but it something goes 2 days without a check-in, and the beeper/alert test shows it working, then I add that device to this rule.
This was worked well for me, for a year or two, and avoids false alerts, yet doesn't add much to the battery load with pointless wake ups and traffic. YMMV. - But I put up with a bit of extra work here on TR ZB sensors, as I like the local beeper, the fact that these sensors are cheap (but a bit ugly), and I LOVE the AAA batteries, versus dealing with more coin cells - These things seem to run about 2 years before requiring a battery change. I use the Zooz Z-wave water sensors where they are visible, and not inside some cabinet.
I'm am using the refresh for these devices in Device Activity Check and that's set to 24 hours. The Device Alert I mentioned is related to the alert/notification I'm getting from Device Activity Check.
What is "Last Activity At" field related to? It seems to be related to the last time the device was triggered, or in the case of the TR sensors they alert, It doesn't seem to the related to whether or not the device is reporting / responding and connected to the hub, I'm coming to this conclusion because it's using "Last Activity At" which is when the last time I triggered the sensor. That is the date I see in the field in the devices details section, the devices events, and when I get the daily Device Activity Alert report, they all say 4/13. However, I also see the command to refresh the device every day since then at exactly the same time, and on the zigbee settings I see the last message as being today. Clearly it's currently connected, but I'm still getting the Daily Activity Report notification with this device on it showing last activity 4/13. Shouldn't I only be getting the notification for a device that's no longer connected?
Itâs best to let go of the idea that battery-powered Zigbee End Devices maintain a connection to the hub.
I think there is some kind of minimum heartbeat/keep alive requirement for ZEDs to communicate with the controller in the Zigbee spec but from memory itâs measured in days and many ZEDs donât bother with it (eg Sonoff). Thankfully HE is permissive about those and in my experience they never get kicked off.
So ZEDs are only ever paired to the mesh the hub is controlling and are only âconnectedâ, in any useful sense of the word, at the very moment they communicate something and not otherwise.
Thank you for your reposes, but I'm bit confused by this, and the meaning of highlighting of portions of my earlier response. Are you saying this because zigbee, when powered by battery is not reliable, or is it something else? Does that mean that leak sensors provide a false sense of security, considering most are battery powered, and many do not have audible alarms so they rely on staying connected?
I've been a long time hubitat user an have my whole house automated, but never had leak sensors until I recently had a dishwasher leak causing $50k worth of damages that the insurance company denied to cover. So I researched what I could do to not let that happen again, resulting in buying pans and leak sensors. I did quite a bit of research on the sensors themselves finding that TR seemed to be a reliable choice that also offered audible alerts. I thought the dishwasher was fixed until I got a call from the wife telling me that something was beeping loudly under the dishwasher, however, I got no notice on my phone. The device that I thought was connected, was not, and luckily she happened to be home to hear the audible alert. So I did more research to find Device Alert Report that would supposedly tell me if the device was off the network so could proactively resolve. However, it's sending me a report from every daily check listing this and some of the other devices which I'm interpreting that the device has fallen off the network based on the documentation for the app. As mentioned, that you highlighted,
I'm trying to understand how this app works because it seems to me that it does not work as it's described, or I'm not understanding something. I was hoping it's me not understanding something with the app, but that doesn't seem to be the case, it just doesn't do what it says it should do.
Ultimately, I just want a reliable way to detect leaks. If there's a better way to do this I'd love to hear about it as this has become more difficult that it should be.
Have you seen this?
What version of the firmware are you running?
(By the way, if you do decide to update the firmware, please note that it takes a few minutes. Check your logs to make sure that the device is finished updating. Only do 1 device at a time. )
You should get messages in your log like this:
Thanks @jtmpush18 and @bbrannon, nice to see Iâm not going crazy and this is a known problem. Found that 2 of the 3 sensors have firmware 38, and the other is 34. Tried updating the 34 but it doesnât seem to be working. I have using the generic no temp driver. I did remove and re-add the dishwasher sensor and it seems to be reporting temp with the refresh from Device Activity in events, the last activity in the deviceâs settings is updating at that same time, and it didnât show up on the report today. The other one that is 38 is not showing any of those events. Iâll give it a couple days to confirm itâs operating correctly, and then Iâll remove the others and re-add them to see if that solves their problem. Iâll report back
Update - ended up reaching out to 3reality support and found that the firmware needed updating, but it wouldn't update for my through habitat. They explained that the firmware and sdk that needed to updated was a large package and zigbee network is designed for low traffic so I needed to move the sensors next to the hub. You also need to look at live logs after kicking off the firmware update, you won't see the update logs in past logs, and debug logging needs to be on. After doing this I did get the firmware updated to one ending 3A, however the application was supposed to also update to 3A and mine did not. If it had been successful I was told I should see this, but I didn't.
I told them they can have them back and they offered to send me replacements that were already updated.
You may have noticed I mentioned SDK, that's because their chip vendor had an upgrade that broke backwards compatibility and this updated is required for these things to work correctly. Certainly not a common thing, but was a pit perturbed that I bought them less than 2 months ago from 3reality and they sent me something that needed to be updated, and that update would work in a normal environment. I only knew because I had a small leak and didn't get a notification through habitat/homekit. Wonder how many water sensors are out there that won't work right now, so check them if you have them, The one saving grace with these is that they do have an audible alert.
It will be a couple weeks before I have the replacements, but once I do I'll report back if there's any further issues with device activity check once with the latest firmware and app versions.
Essentially this. I own a dozen of these sensors and use them for the same reason you do, however I do not view them as reliable, even though I've never had one "fall off the mesh".
There's no concept of a maintained connection and one can only speculate on the device's status based on the age of the last message received vs its usual behaviour. Again we are "lucky" in the case of this specific device as it seems to always respond to "read attribute" requests (part of what Refresh() does) so you have control over the interval of quiet you can be comfortable with. I am personally OK with a 24-hour check-in period. When we're in, the audible signal from the device is enough to get our attention.
I use these in combination with an automated main water valve (a Sinope). The valve is closed whenever the house is empty, preventing any possibility of a major leak while we're away, or at any time one of the leak sensors is triggered. The valve is mains-powered and has 4xAAA Lithium battery backup that can last for weeks. You can also buy a (wired) flow sensor that installs in series with the valve and allows some leak detection to be done that way.
Although the one I use is controlled via HE, you can get versions of this valve to which water sensors can be (wirelessly) connected directly so you don't have to rely on a hub.
I stumbled upon this new 3A firmware a couple of days ago. Installed it on one of my devices. I did not need to move it close to the hub, however it did take something like 30 minutes (and 2,800 zigbee messages) to complete.
I have good and bad news.
Good : with debug logs on, I can see that an update comes in once per hour. Not visible without debug logs because the hub filters attribute reports that are not a state change. Looks like an IAS report so I am assuming this is wet/dry status and, since it doesn't change, the hub is filtering the report.
EDIT: when I first took the screenshot I noticed the in and out clusters were missing so I went back and set the driver to Device and hit GetInfo before going back to the moisture driver. Now that the clusters are there the battery reports 99%
Interesting, Iâll look into the valve. Wouldnât have helped with my situation though, I had a slow leak under a dishwasher that damaged all the cabinets from the inside/underneath and the flooring before I noticed it. Found out that itâs common for insurance to now have an exclusion that they wonât cover leaks that lasted for more than 14 days, whether youâre aware or not, so i got screwed.
Wow sorry to hear that. Yeah the flow sensor is pretty sensitive (seen it report low 100s of millilitres/minute) but probably not sensitive enough for effective detection of what you experienced.
