Earlier today we discovered that the GFCI in our garage had tripped and the freezer and refrigerator did not have power. Luckily we caught it before any food had spoiled, but I've always worried that this could happen. I've seen a couple ways to monitor power status using battery-powered contact switches, but I'd like to explore something a bit more "creative." I'm only looking to report status of a single GFCI circuit, not my entire home. My proposed method below requires main power and internet service to be available.
I noticed that my Zooz ZEN24 dimmer has lots of commands exposed in the driver (Double Tap, Push, Hold, Release) that, when activated via the device settings page, cause the "Current States" to change but the physical device does not respond. For example: If I physically tap UP on the toggle switch, the light will turn on and the state of pushed will change to 1. However, if I use the device settings page, type "1" into the text box of the Push command, the value of pushed changes to 1 but the light remains off.
I'm hoping to exploit this behavior to monitor the responsiveness of the device and notify a power loss event if the device does not respond. Obviously, the dimmer device will need to be powered by the same GFCI circuit I want to monitor. The trigger will likely be periodic. The rule logic will probably be something like this:
Set local-var-1 to pushed
Run Custom Command on Dimmer: Push(3)
wait 10 seconds
IF value of Dimmer pushed != 3 THEN
notify something
END-IF
Run Custom Command on Dimmer: Push(%local-var-1%)
The switch only has two "buttons" so the value can never be 3 unless set to that value using the commands within HE. I'm assuming that the device will not update the state variable if it cannot respond, and it should only fail to respond in the event that it loses power. Any comments on if this will work or not?
I would just get a Ring Alarm Extender and plug it in to that circuit. It will let you know when it has changed to battery, and another zwave extender is always useful.
Nope--the push() command (for this device and most devices, though it apparently has some use for some Lutron devices) works entirely in the driver, just generating a "digital" push event, more or less like a virtual button device would do. Its biggest use would be triggering apps you have on the hub without needing to perform a physical event to do so (so, for example, you could make this event happen from a Dashboard button without needing to create a virtual button and add that to your app as something, too).
Or, long story short, it won't work for this purpose.
Well, shucks. I tested this just to be sure and you are indeed correct. Even with no power to the device I am still able to change the value of the pushed state. Thanks for saving me the effort of actually writing the rule and testing it.
Yes it does. The first one I got was used exactly for the purpose of this thread. Our freezer in the garage is on a GFCI circuit with our patio. During a heavy rain, one of the outlets on the patio tripped the GFCI, and the freezer lost power. My wife discovered the next morning that the freezer seemed to be defrosting. Troubleshooting showed the cause to be the tripped GFCI. Got a Ring Extender Gen 2, put it on that circuit, no problems since.
Rule is posted below.
One problem, though: when you have an extended whole-house power fail, in which one rule shuts our UPS-powered hub down before the UPS fails, the Ring Extender will return to mains power before the hub boots, so that the hub misses the “return to mains” event sent to the hub by the Ring extender. So, you have to have a rule triggered on systemStart that refreshes the state of each of your Ring Extenders on each boot.
The Private Boolean enforces a critical region in case the power is flapping on and off.
And then, the following rule shuts the hub down when all show power fail. This prevents shutdown if one breaker is tripped for some reason, or if someone knocks a Ring Extender out of the socket:
At one time I had a voting test to see if a majority of the Ring Extenders showed power fail, rather than all. The voting test simply counts, inside a critical region, the number of Ring Extenders on battery. That’s not in use right now.
EDIT: In case it’s not clear, here are the definitions of the Global Variables that are used in the voting that replaces the first conditional in the shutdown rule. That conditional is replaced by a critical region that sums the onBattery numbers.
I've no personal experience, but I do know the V2 extender is not listed on the compatible devices page. Although I did see an Amazon review specifically mentioning using the V2 and a C7 hub for this purpose. As well as the comment above. Probably start a thread in the support section asking this specific question.
Not that I know of. I used it on my C5, and it seemed to have worked. You don't get the routing tables like the C7, but it definitely paired. Oh, and you also cannot pair the C5 with S2 security (it doesn't have it), you have to use the alternate non-secure pairing.
