I have a Zooz Power Switch controlled by the Hubitat Elevation Home Automation Hub (Model C-8 Pro V. 2.3.9.201). If the power goes off, I want a message pushed to my phone app, and again, if it comes back on.
I have a Basic Rule set to "When a switch turns off and stays off for 10 seconds --> Send notification to mobile device".
This rule only works if I use the on/off switch on the power switch. Is there a way to get it to send the message if the wall outlet loses power?
Not easily. The device needs power to send a message to the hub about its on/off state. If it loses power, it doesn't have any way to communicate to the hub.
There are options that can tell you when power is lost, often in the form of Z-Wave repeaters with built-in battery backups. The Zooz ZAC38 is one example. The Ring Range Extender is another. You also do DIY solutions by combining a contact sensor or something with external contacts, a relay, and power supply (Zooz used to sell one, maybe not anymore after after releasing a product that can actually do it).
The only other thing you could really do with this is send a command, see if the device responds, then consider it likely "offline" if it didn't respond. A rule could do this on demand, or there are apps (including Device Activity Check, which I wrote) that can just periodically monitor this.
Also, as is often the case, there might be an entirely different approach you could take towards whatever your actual goal is here. If you state more generally what that is, someone might be able to give you better ideas.
Thanks, Bert.
My goal is to be notified if the switch loses power. It sounds like the 'send command' is the best option. Is there a way to check for a device's presence using a Basic Rule? I don't see it.
I wouldn't really use the term "presence" here, both because as a standard Hubitat attribute name that normally means something else (geofence status) and because there is nothing on the device itself (e.g., such an attribute) you'd be able to look at. Even if you could, Basic Rule wouldn't work since you don't have the ability to use conditional actions, which would be the most straightforward way to do this.
Even with Rule Machine, you'd likely have to send command to change the device state (e.g., turn off if on, on if off, wait a bit, and see what the state is then). Would that be a problem for your use case? If so, an approach that is actually geared towards detecting power loss would be better. All you can really do with any other kind of device like this is just infer based on what you do know.
The goal is to know if my water line heat is off. It doesn't matter how I get there. When I purchased this switch, I thought it would do the trick.
But turning the switch off would turn the heater off, then, right? That seems like it would be undesirable (although you could turn it back on). If the driver generates a new "Last Activity At" date with a refresh, that would be another way of approaching this automation, but not all drivers/devices will do anything there -- but if it does, a "Refresh" won't change the device state.
Z-Wave doesn't really have a way to know when a device is "offline" like if it might be unplugged, though you can make some guesses based on what you can observe (like sending a command and seeing no response). So, in general, this kind of automation is tricky unless you have something like the above that can reliably detect power loss while still having a way to actually send that data back to the hub.
I should add that my assumptions above are that you want to know more than if this was manually switched off via Z-Wave, which is very easy to detect (as opposed to it being unplugged or the circuit being switched off somewhere else, etc.).
Which model power switch is it? If it is a ZEN15, which it should be if controller a heat source, you can do this.
Have it report Power every 3-5 minutes. Set up a rule such that if power is less than a threshold, or does not report for, say, 15 minutes, you'll get alerted. It won't be the easiest rule since you are triggering on the absence of something happening, but it can be done.
That wouldn't do it 'cause the plug has no power to report the situation.
And that’s why the rule acts in the absence of the report. I use something similar for my radon fan. As long as it is reporting a certain threshold of power, nothing happens.
It is a ZEN15. As pointed out below, it doesn't work if the plug has no power. Here is my rule:
Can you tell me how you got this to work for your radon fan?
Yes. I need to know of the switch does not have source power.
This is pretty frustrating. It seems like the router should be able to ping the device to see if it's online.
It turns out the way I do the radon fan is spanned over several of my rules that work together. So let's just create a test example. I'm using dehumidifier instead because it is a ZEN15. Ignore the cosmetic "radon fan" in the log message; I forgot to change it.
Setting power reports on the Zooz Power Switch at 30 seconds, I then create a rule as follows
which results in
It is left as an exercise for the interest student to have this rule set a hub variable LastTime or something that is set to %now%. Then create another rule that runs every five minutes that compares LastTime to the current time. If it is more than two minutes, alert you that the power switch isn't reporting in.
This is a bit kludgey. It assumes that the power will vary by one thousandths of a watt every 30 seconds. I thought there was a way to trigger in when a power monitor reported anything regardless of value, but that escapes me at the moment.
Also, don't go nuts with the frequency of the power reports. They can create a lot of traffic, especially if you have more than one. I think one device reporting in every 30 seconds is OK.
After writing all this, I think it might be best to back up and define exactly what you are trying to monitor ..
You can do something like a Refresh every 30", but I'm not a fan of spamming my hub 24/7 with information that's 99% useless.
The best solution was proposed by Robert earlier -- put a ZAC38 or Ring Extender v2 on that receptacle (or circuit). That provides instantaneous power-state change info without hammering your hub needlessly every 30" or whatever.
All of this presumes your hub is on a UPS -- if not and its circuit goes down too, then you're SOL on any solution.
Thanks! I'll dig into this tomorrow.
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