Hi,
I have a handful of water sensors scattered around my house, and today I poured water on one to see if it works... And it didn't. Not only it didn't even change state (from dry to wet), the valve didn't close. This is one of the primary requirements for home automation and for some reason, it doesn't work anymore.
All sensors have ok battery levels and seem to communicate regularly with the hub.
The only thing I noticed was that another custom Safety Monitor for battery levels on said sensors was triggered by a sensor in which I had already changed the battery...
If the device doesn't change from dry to wet then the valve won't close. What sensors are you using? Many have wet/dry sensor as well as temperature if so I'd suggest using something like Device Watchdog to let you know if the device doesn't have activity for more than 14 hours or something. I've had sensors stop working in the past and found the battery was dead (wouldn't light up when putting the battery back in) but still showed 100%.
Well it's likely not the water valve, it's the sensor. I agree with @Terk , device watchdog would be useful. Change the battery out and see if it picks back up on the mesh, if not it likely needs re pairing.
In order for HSM to close the valve is if the water sensors reports a wet condition. Water sensors need to be checked periodically to ensure they are working properly, and properly doesn’t just mean it’s reporting battery or temperature. Properly means it reports moisture correctly. I have 19 spread across my house and I test them from time to time.
If your sensor isn’t reporting wet then it might have failed and time to find a replacement. Important to check the others too.
Looking at sensors, I found a couple that were out of battery, which is odd because I also configured a battery alert. It seems to me that either the general sensor polling isn't working, or the sensors themselves don't communicate back. Those are SmartThings sensors I repurposed. They worked well with ST and with HE until somewhat recently. Is there a way to diagnose sensor comms more thoroughly?
What kind of sensors are they? Are they ZWave+ of just ZWave? If the latter, know that one difference between ST and HE is that the latter does not by default poll devices, since ZWave+ and Zigbee should be reporting on their own.
The ST leak sensors are zigbee. From personal experience with a decent zigbee mesh they work just fine.
@physh could be a mesh issue... especially if they are not reporting battery either. Have you tried something like Device Watchdog? It does a great job of reporting sensors that have not checked in recently as well as sensors reporting low battery.
OK, for some reason when I read his comment, I took it to mean "sensors brought over from use in SmartThings" rather than "SmartThings sensors". That's why I asked. Was trying to get to where the idea that these sensors were being polled came from.
I have quite a few SmartThings leak sensors as well, and thought I'd been happy with them. But lately I've encountered a couple of them that report wet but not dry, or aren't reporting battery unless reset.
SmartThings sensors brought over is the right way to describe them. I manually repaired all of them, one had a dead battery but I still don't understand why the stopped reporting while communications were seemingly still happening (based on timestamps at least).
