bottleneck
Choose style:

Author Topic: reliable flood sensors?  (Read 2471 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline NB1H

  • Newbie
  • Posts: 1
  • Thanks: 0
  • Registered : 22/04/2017
    YearsYearsYearsYearsYearsYearsYears
reliable flood sensors?
« on: October 28, 2017, 04:02:17 pm »
I bought an everspring ST812-2 Z-Wave Water/Flood Sensor a few months ago. I connected it to my Almond +, tested it once, then set it on the shelf and forgot about it.  Fast forward a few months, and I'm ready to install the sensor in my basement.  I decide to do another test just to make sure it's still ok, but nothing happens when I expose the terminals to water. I tested the batteries and found that they are completely dead, however my almond+ still reports that the device is "OK" and that the battery level is 100% (even when I completely remove the batteries from the sensor)

 I understand that the device probably isn't polled by the almond (to avoid wasting the battery), and probably doesn't report it's status either (also to save battery), but that doesn't give me any confidence that it will actually work to protect me from a flooding event. I imagine that someone else must have thought about this, given that there are a number of security related sensors out there that could be considered mission-critical.

I would consider buying another brand sensor if it were more reliable, and I would also consider hard wiring this to a power supply instead of using batteries. Are either of these a good solution? Even if I had a hard-wired sensor that didn't use batteries, I still would like to be able to poll the sensor to confirm that it works ok (even if only one every couple weeks). I plan on putting this sensor in a hidden location that would make it hard to manually test regularly.

Offline grouter

  • Beta Testers
  • *
  • Posts: 501
  • Thanks: 1
  • Registered : 01/01/2015
    YearsYearsYearsYearsYearsYearsYearsYearsYears
Re: reliable flood sensors?
« Reply #1 on: October 29, 2017, 06:47:39 am »
There is likely a zwave parameter or two in the sensor for controlling sleeping and reporting intervals. All zwave battery powered sensors I've looked into have these and the parameters can be set using the A+ LCD. Battery level likely will not work given what you've already seen, but you may get lucky if you can get the sensor to wake and report on an interval. The parameters you need to look for are hex codes..

 

Page created in 0.058 seconds with 18 queries.