Battery Monitoring and Alerts on Z Wave Devices

Devices & Integrations
1

Hello…

I’m nearing the end of getting the house set up. It’s over 90 individual sensors/switches and should settle out at 125.

One thing I’m already anticipating is a need to monitor/refresh batteries. With 10 door/window sensors and 8 motion detectors (+4 misc sensors) all on CR123A batteries, they’re going to go at various times. The brands are all over the place… Aeon Labs, Monoprice, Fibaro…

Does anyone know of/has anyone done a script that polls every X hours, checks battery status, and reports back? If not, will be putting that together and publishing that out in the future but didn’t want to duplicate work. I’d in turn add that to my home dashboard. Looking to simplify/centralize monitoring sensors that run on battery.

Thanks!

1 Like
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You know that waking up a device to check battery status uses up batteries, right?

You shouldn’t have to do this, most sensors should report a low battery on their own. Then you just subscribe to that event and use it to trigger some notification in time to schedule replacement.

Not sure if there are any SmartThings-specific issues with battery reporting, though.

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This one works well for me:

4

Thanks folks. Trying the smart app now @beckwith. @JDRoberts I have the sensors a couple of levels down on my dashboard. They live there to feed some automated processes. Even pinging 1x/day to see it in one shot would be useful to get a single dash to see any issues.

Thanks!

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If you run ActiON you get all the battery levels on the screen.

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Trying that out as well. Thanks!

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Look in the Shared Apps in the IDE. I recall seeing at least 2 apps and I am using one of them called Low Battery Alert.

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Hi @frisch, I use 2 SmartApps. It doesn’t matter if the device is zwave or zigbee: (shared apps in the IDE)

BatteryMonitor doesn’t notify you, but it does list every battery powered device and the current level. I use this one a lot.

Here’s a copy of the SmartApp code I copied:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/constjs/SmartThings-Apps/master/batterystatus.app.groovy

Low Battery Notifier/Warning/Alert will send you a message when a device falls below a value you provide.

Here’s a copy of the SmartApp code I copied:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/constjs/SmartThings-Apps/master/low_battery_notification.app.groovy

Hope that helps. BTW - finding these apps is a real PITA in the IDE because you can’t search shared apps.

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Thanks! This is all good stuff. I know re: IDE… suggestion perhaps for @Ben to put on the train schedule (hint / wink)… I usually hit Google with a site:github.com at the end, but that’s not perfect.

The main thing I was looking for, which there were a couple of good suggestions, was the alerting. I’m OCD to a point, but I don’t check my batteries daily. What I was looking for was something that simply popped an alert that said “my battery’s low, recharge me!” (took a while, but AMZN does have CR123A rechargeables pretty cheap with decent mAh). Similar to what Nest does with Protect, or heck, what my iPhone does when it’s below 20%.

Similar suggestion for @Ben (I have to find the suggestion box / feature request area): alerts when any device on ST is below X% battery, if it’s a battery device.

Thanks!

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I changed BatteryMonitor several months ago to nag about low batteries at a set time daily. I found that I would forget that I got a low battery notification because the time of day the notification came in or because I dismissed the notification without changing the battery.

https://github.com/notoriousbdg/SmartThings.BatteryMonitor

4 Likes
11

Hi I have this app installed but I show 3 batteries with error or no status, one of them is the Monoprice sensor. I got the link for this app off of that thread so i found it kind of strange that it isn’t report. The other is a Aeon Door-Window sensor, and the last is the Ecolink Tilt, is there anything I can do to get these to show staus properly? Thank

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Did you ever get this cleared up?

13

Any updates on best way to get up to date battery status? ST and BatteryMonitor only show the last reported percentages, I’ve come to find out that some of these devices have never updated their status since install, thus many of these statuses are simply wrong. ST and BatteryMonitor do not actually force a device to manually report the current status. From what I’ve gathered, the device handlers need to setup the update time with the device, ST assigns many devices to generic device handlers, thus there is no real standard on getting an up to date status.

Many of times it appears the only indication of battery status is when it actually totally fails, thus that critical device you think is monitoring your water tank or sump pump for a leak will never report a failure in time of need cause its battery is dead.

I have 3 moisture sensors, two assigned generic device handlers by ST, thus there has been no battery updates since initial install, thus both say 100%. The 3rd is a ST device with a tailored device handler, thus seems to report every month or so. As of today, I checked the logs in IDE and not one of the 10+ battery devices (motion, moisture, temp, multi) have any updated battery info in the logs, thus I’d assume the percentage in not accurate, and most are still showing 99-100%.

With that said, I have 3 First Alert Fire/CO2 detectors and they seem to report pretty regular, the oldest battery report on the 3 is 8 hours ago. Those devices show up in ST with levels varying from 83-89%, thus at least I feel safe with those units, but I really hate not knowing if my moisture sensors are working… Really want them to at least send battery data once a week or month. Motion sensors are not a big deal, unless you are using them for security.

Any thoughts on getting them to update better? Thinking of creating a special device handler to force weekly updates, could care less if the battery don’t last as long; a small price to pay knowing they will work when a failure occurs.