I recently purchased / installed a Dome water sensor. It works great. I tested many times, and it was able to accurately detect when water was present and when it was dry.
My only issue is detecting if/when it goes offline. Is this possible? For example, if the device were to fail, I would never know. I tested by removing the device from my house, and there was no notification. Upon returning to my house, it became ‘online’ again after a couple hours. But there was never a notification. My concern is that a device could fail, and I’d never know if a water leak occurred during that failure.
Seems like a reasonable feature, doesn’t it? The SmartThings app definitely knows the device is no longer online, since it shows my Dome as offline/disconnected when out of range. I emailed support, and got the following:
There is no native way to get notified if a device falls offline at the current moment (at least not natively). It is something we hope to implement in the future, but in the meantime you may be able to find a custom workaround on our community here: https://community.smartthings.com
The go to smartapp for this for a couple of years has been one created by a community member, called “simple device viewer.” It tracks the status entries from device check-in‘s in the smartthings cloud, and then when time has gone by without a check in (you get to specify the time), it will notify you. People have been really happy with this.
The problem is that it’s really likely that this is not going to work once smartthings completes its transition to its new architecture, probably sometime later this year. we’re just not seeing the same kind of history anymore.
So definitely, you could use it for now, but you just need to be aware that it may go away in a few months. I think that’s why we are seeing more people doing what @Awestun suggested.
If you do want to look into simple device viewer, here’s the thread for that. People there can answer any additional questions.
If you haven’t used custom code before, right now it’s pretty simple, basically you will copy and paste the code into your own account. But again, all of this is going to change once they complete the transition to the new architecture. The following FAQ will explain the basic terms and concepts. (Simple device viewer is a smartapp, not a DTH.) And you can ask specific questions in the simple device viewer thread.
Thanks for the information! Just curious why this isn’t already a feature in the official SmartThings application. It seems like a pretty standard (and serious) feature. I guess I’ll wait and see what comes from the “new architecture”. What exactly is the new architecture all about? Will my existing Dome still work?
No idea why it’s not a feature. Or why anything is or isn’t a feature. It’s never been clear what the smartthings’ design philosophy was.
As far as the future, there have been some official announcements, but not a lot of detail, and as of yet no detail on what will happen with Z wave or other hub Connected Devices. The transition to Aeotec makes it seem likely that they will continue to support zwave devices at the generic level, but again, no details as to whether or not we’ll be able to have custom code for hub connected devices in the future.
here’s the official announcement. The topic title is a clickable link.
we’re just not seeing the same kind of history anymore.