When any sensor gets “stuck” in one reporting state, open or closed, it’s almost always one of the following:
Low battery. once the battery gets down to about 30%, the signal strength drops by a lot. It just may not be able to report. So you may want to try just changing the battery if it’s getting low. sometimes a new device gets delivered with a bad battery, it can happen.
orphaned nodes. Zigbee does have a vulnerability to this. The fix is to unplug the hub for at least 15 minutes, including removing the batteries. This will cause all the zigbee devices to realize they’ve lost connection to the network, and then when you plug the hub back in the address tables will get rebuilt. You may not see an improvement until the next day, it can take a while for the changes to propagate.
If this is a zwave sensor, run the zwave repair utility to update those address tables. Again, you may not see improvement until several hours after the utility completes, so be patient.
range. This is easy to test, we just bring the sensor close to the hub and see if the status changes correctly.
position. As others have noted some contact sensors are more particular than others, usually because they have a weaker magnet. Again, the way to test this is to take the sensor off the door and see if just moving the pieces around will change the state.
failed configuration. So you can always just try resetting it and pair again. If you don’t rejoin with the sensor in its final position, then you have to do the unplug the hub thing from step one for Zigbee devices (or zwave repair for zwave devices) to get the address tables built correctly.
the following problem is specific to magnetic devices. If there is a piece of metal nearby, including a metal window frame, a metal door, sometimes even a metal switch plate, the magnet can magnetize that piece of metal, and then The sensor gets very confused. there are a couple of forum topics on this. If this is the problem, it will take a while to fix because it takes a week or two for the other metal to lose its charge. But this is one of the first things the field tech will look for if a sensor works just fine for a few days or a week and then gets stuck.
Folks, I’m hoping you can help here. I went through the steps suggested to try to get my Ecolink DWZWAVE2-ECO door sensor to register the correct state, but it is stuck on open no matter how many times include/exclude it from the network or run the z wave repair utility. I am also running GoControl sensors and it should be noted that the Ecolink sensor only pairs as a GoControl sensor. In order to get the GoControl sensors to pair I added the device handler to the EDI. I guess this is causing a conflict? But I would have assumed that the native Ecolink handler would work given that it is a officially supported device. Any thoughts here on what I should do to get the Ecolink to work? The main reason I’m trying to use the Ecolink is that it has post for adding wired reeds and I have two windows and a door setup in a series from an old alarm system that I would like to tap into. Thx in advance for your help.
Or possibly something else! Here’s the story of a contact sensor that asynchronously showed a door was ‘open’ when it wasn’t – and how I “fixed” the problem even though I was 1500 miles away…
