I am new to SmartThings and home automation in general. So far, my experience has been very positive, but the Aeon Labs Multi Sensor is giving me headaches:
The motion sensor is randomly reporting false positives. Often, in the middle of the night, when I know for a fact that all motion has ceased. I have a bunch of them, and they are all displaying this problem. In order to get a baseline, and eliminate problems with the distance to the hub, I set up one of them right next to the Hub, which is in a room of the house that we do no use. I also pointed it at the ceiling, and it is still reporting false positives.
I first had them set up at 1/2 sensitivity, but I now reduced them to about 1/3.
Keep reducing sensitivity I guess. You might also try putting one in a closed box and see if it’s giving off motion. Obviously shouldn’t be if it’s in a box, so if it is you have a problem. Either defective sensors or a haunted house.
For what it’s worth I have two of these sensors and they are both operating pretty well for me.
Is it possible that you have a very drafty house? Or are they located near where heating vents are? I think these are IR sensors so if you’ve got a suddent gust of hot or cold air that blows by, that might enough to set them off.
Okay, I dialed the sensitivity all the way down. I will give it a day or two to see if I get any more false positives.
Good suggestion regarding the ‘closed box test’. I just moved into my place and the room with the hub is pretty much empty, with the blinds and door shut at all times. If I can’t get the sensor to work reliably in this basic scenario, I’m not sure of how much use it really is to me.
I started reading Amazon reviews on the Aeon Multi sensor and it sounds like there are a number of people reporting this same problem. The SmartThings motion sensor performs as expected, but it unfortunately picks up my small dog’s movements. If there is no workaround for them problem with the Aeons I might give the Schlage sensors a try.
I had the sensitivity turned down all the way, and one of the sensors was still reporting a false positive, last night.
This is unfortunate, because I really want to like these sensors. They looked very promising, and honestly are a pretty good deal for the price and advertised features. The issues I am seeing make them pretty much useless to me, i.e. I’ll have to send them back and try something else. Bummer…
Thanks, @chrisb. Not implying that these necessary have a design flaw. Maybe all three of mine are simply defective, or I am doing something wrong? I will contact Aeon support.
I just heard back from Aeon support. They were very helpful and informed me that this is a know problem that a few of these sensors are suffering from and that they are working on a firmware fix. They are currently unable to give me an ETA for the fix, but I will try to remember to update this post once I hear back from them.
Mine actually worked really well the first 5 months or so I’ve have it. I got it in May and it worked REALLY well as a motion sensor to trigger my lights on my deck. But in the last month or so have run into the same problems and have had “hey… why are the lights on again!” to the point that I turned it off - I haven’t had any time to look into it.
I just recently noticed that my batteries died (with there was some notification when a “thing” stops communicating with the hub!) They were reporting at 100% still actually. (I thought it used to report the battery %… hmmm.)
So - I swapped the batteries and have noticed the same issue as you with the motion etc. Please post back what you find! I might be requesting a replacement!
I may try an unpair/repair to see if that helps mine as well.
Eric, I tried re-pairing and it did not help in my case. I also replaced the batteries with new ones, and still no cigar. Mine were exhibiting this faulty behavior the moment I took them out of the box, though.
I returned the sensors for now, and I am waiting to hear back from Aeon, because I really want one or two for outdoors. I am going to wait until they have a fix for this problem.
I am now using the Schlage Motion Sensors for indoors and they work amazingly well. No more false positives and they appear to cover a much wider area, while still being insensitive to my small dog. They also promise much longer battery life - we’ll see. I miss having the temperature, humidity and luminosity readings, though.
I use Vera currently but am seriously looking into ST as the interface seems to be much simpler and easier for the masses. Anyways, I am having the same issue with my Aeon 4-in-1’s. Any word back from them about some sort of firmware update yet? Probably not since it’s only been about a week since you posted about that.
Any idea how to actually apply a firmware update to a device in Vera?? I’ve never had to do that before so not sure the procedure. Maybe it is automatic with any devices that are connected to Vera?
Also, any idea how the ST motion sensor works? Any issues like with the Aeon?
@cnguitarist, I have not heard back from Aeon, sorry.
You can update the firmware by plugging the sensor into one of the USB ports on your computer. The USB port on the sensor is in the battery compartment. The firmware updater (which you can get from Aeon’s website) requires a Windows PC.
The ST motion sensor works beautifully! It is really sensitive, yet does not record false positives. Only drawback is that you cannot adjust the sensitivity, so it doesn’t work very well with pets. You can compensate for some pet movement by mounting choice, but this hasn’t worked too well for me.
I also have a few of the Schlage Nexia motion sensors. They work with ST and are currently on sale on Amazon.com (20% or 25% discount on checkout). They do have adjustable sensitivity. I remember it being something like one option for pets up to 30 lbs, the other for pets up to 70 lbs.
I have my 4 in one updated to the latest firmware 1.8 and suffer from the some issues.
My problems:
1- motion sensor will get stuck in motion
2- sensor will not operate with ST anymore when showing 100% battery
3- eats batteries in a few days sometimes
What I noticed is that all the problems might be linked to the some issue, the batteries. It seems to me that as soon as the amperage of the batteries gets a bit to low but still has enough power, the “energy” left is not sufficient to run the device and causes the failures. As soon as I change for brand new batteries, the problem is fixed but if I put back the old batteries it won’t work even if these same batteries will still have enough power to operate things like a flashlight for example.
Just received lithium batteries and will test this option for not but I have the impression this might do the trick as the lithium batteries are consistent in out up of power until “empty”.
I have the same problem with the Aeon sensors, lot’s of false positives with the sensitivity turned down to the lowest level. Updated firmware, etc. Since this is the only motion/temperature sensor that is outdoor rated I’m pretty bummed…
I have mine trigger some of the outside lights to raise their brightness so I’m sure in the middle of the night it looks like a light show from time to time.
Many of the one’s I have are in covered areas - so my hope is that I can replace these with Fibaro motion sensors, which seem to be much higher quality.
I, too, have these exact same symptoms. Aeon support says it is a smartthings problem, but I don’t see how that can be, since only the aeon can generate events. I finally put the thing in a corner with no vehicles in my driveway, pointed straight down so it can’t be seeing motion from trees or passing cars. It still alerts just as much: every few minutes, with or without motion.