Hi. I’m trying to set up up an alarm to notify me immediately if the fridge or freezer door is opened. The only conditions available in SmartThings Routines are “freezer set temperature” and “fridge set temperature”. Can anyone instruct me how to add the “door open” condition. I can see that this condition is available in the app, because the overview shows whether the door is open or closed.
There isn’t an available trigger for this. If you wanted an alarm to trigger every time the door opened I could imagine that could get tedious very quickly, our fridge for example is opened 26 on average times a day. I would envisage that it would be much higher for a larger family.
Might be possible with a virtual contact sensor and a rule that mirrors the attribute…
Please login here, select the fridge, take screenshots from the whole page and post them here.
Thanks. I have a daughter with an eating disorder. I would time-restrict this trigger to overnight only.
Thank you. Yes I can see all open and close events on this link. What do you mean by “virtual door sensor” - the appliance already has a physical one built in
Yes, but it’s obviously not exposed in the app…
You could create a virtual contact sensor and “mirror” the state of the physical sensor.
Since you haven’t provided the requested screenshots, we can’t tell if it would be possible.
Andreas, You’ve been very helpful. I appreciate it. I’ll have a look at this option and let you know
Ah, do i need a SmartThings hub for this? I have only the fridge
I have a Centrica Hive hub already in place
No. The virtual contact sensor would be a cloud device…
Also, take a look at the 3rd party rules engine sharptools.io which exposes more capabilities of the device as triggers than the ST app. Since your ST Routines run in the ST cloud anyway, no harm in having rules that run in the sharptools cloud.
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If you have Alexa or Google home a contact sensor on the door might help , one like this supposedly works with Alexa and would give you notifications. Assuming it would fit on your fridge door, that might depend a bit on the design of your fridge and possibly any cabinets surrounding it
Thanks all for your kind and helpful input. As it seems that the basic problem is that the “door open” condition is not exposed in the ST app, I will ask Samsung to expose it. I’ll keep you posted
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Samsung has a solution as follows…
create a routine to alert you of this in the Home Monitor option in your Life tab.
Here are the steps to do this:
(The Fridge has to be connected your SmartThings app to do this)
- Select the Life tab at the bottom of your SmartThings app
- Press the (+) icon
- Select the Home Monitor option
- Choose security
- Set the Fridge to be a motion sensor option in each section
- In the set response section, a push notification will be set as standard, but you can also choose from other options
There’s another solution that utilizes a virtual contact sensor as mentioned above…
Unfortunately, you can’t time bound the notification which was part of the OP’s requirements.
You’ll wait forever and it will probably never happen. As I mentioned, I would try giving Sharptools a try. Here is an example of the door contact sensor as a trigger in a Sharptools rule (at least for my Samsung fridge):
There is also a freezer contact sensor and if your fridge has a flexzone, there is a contact sensor for that as well. There is also a main:contactSensor that changes state when any of the area-specific contactSensor states changes.
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