Door sensors supporting association or ways to improve response

I have 3 doors in my hallway that are currently setup to turn on a light if opened, they are setup using smart lighting and webcore and there is a noticeable delay from when the door opens and the light turns on. I am hoping I can find door sensors that support association and can directly communicate with the light switch and improve response time.

are there any door sensors that support associations and have a stable device handler for smarthings? your help is greatly appreciated. the community is what makes smarthings a great value. thank you.

Ecolink sensors have an excellent response time, see this benchmark table I whipped up some time ago:

Sometimes it’s not just the sensor at play but the Z-Wave mesh. Do you have Z-Wave repeaters around? How far is the hub from your sensor. These things also have a play in the response time.

BTW, it always helps to just reboot the hub once in a while and you see an improved response time.

1 Like

Which door sensors and lights?

If they’re eligible to run locally with smartlighting, you could try creating an automation that doesn’t include WebCoRE to see if the local execution speeds up the response time.

3 Likes

I would agree with Mark above. If the sensors and switches all can run locally (or use a DTH that does run locally) then Smart Lighting should be almost instantaneous.

I.e. if you are using a custom DTH and under the IDE -> My Devices it says “Cloud” see if you can switch to one that runs locally and then see how quick they react.

1 Like

I have some of the open/close sensors combined with light switches, all DTH running local and smart lighting and response time is ~1/4 seconds. The light is usually on before I the door is half way open.

1 Like

I use the below sensors for my basement doors which we use everyday to come up from the garage. I use Webcore to control the automation and there is basically no delay at all, by the time you have the door open halfway the light is on.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01I5YERWE/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

1 Like

If you decide to buy more Monoprice sensors you can use the code RBOY on the Monoprice for an additional 15% off the ongoing promo price.

You’ve illustrated a good point, which is that users have different experiences with lag and it’s not always clear why; some have a very responsive system even when the cloud is involved, and local processing is by no means a sure bet that lag issues will be cured for others.

For those that do experience lag, I think trying to switch to local processing (if possible) is worth a shot.

I use either lowes iris door sensors when on sale, or SmartThings multi-sensors.

They all run local. They are all instant.

Door opens and light goes on.

What I do in some places is that I also have a motion sensor.

So the opening of the door usually turns on the lights first, if the door is left open, then instead, someone entering the room, triggers the motion sensor to turn on the light, then later when no motion, lights turn off automatically.

I do not use the door close event to turn off lights as maybe you go into the room and close the door and want the lights to stay on.

What do other people do?

You ask about association and contact sensors.

Well I do have experience with the ceiling mounted motion detector, enerwave, it has association and can turn lights on and off and its own.

It worked very well. I still have 2 of them, the batteries last forever.

I no longer use their association capability.

1 Like

thank you all for your suggestions, learning more every day about smarthings…