Hi. Not sure if this is the kind of response anyone is looking for, so bear this in mind.
Some people seem to have had some success with these and the UBS. Some people claiming they’ve ran them for years, no issues.
Honest opinion - I think they’re crap. Really, really poor. If I did the whole thing again I’d have a crack with the arduino instead for temp measurements using DS18b20’s as I’ve found ALL of my fibaro’s (3xUBS & 1 x SI) to randomly fail to report temps after a random period of time. Sometimes after a few hours, sometimes after nearly a week. Maybe once every other day.
My solution was to ask the guys who wrote the DTH’s for both devices to add a tweak which can be used to highlight when a fault occurs, at which point the device can have the power disconnected, and rebooted.
This takes some webcore logic and a smart plug. More details avail if needed.
I find this a difficult answer, because I can’t recommend these at all BUT because I’ve already bought them (and have managed to use them as described), they finally fulfill my needs.
Others may not agree. I think the devices are utterly unreliable. I can’t see how I can have a ‘dud’, when I’ve spent so much time and effort with 4 of them.
The arduino looks amazing, but I haven’t personally tried it. I’ll eventually try it out and hope that it would fill the gap without this ‘clever trickery’ I’ve had to employ.
Checking the logs, 17 hours ago a power cycle was needed.
Working back, ditto for 2 days ago:
And 3 days back, it happened 4 times. Here’s two of them.
Note that I have a single smartplug with a 4 way extension lead containing the 4 x 12v/2A PSUs for each of the fibaros. When a fault is detected on on one of the fib’s, the powercycle kicks in. So I’m not saying that one fails as often as illustrated above, but ONE of them does.
From this thread:
I have a FGBS-001 that I have been using (or attempting to…) for 1.5 years.
The unit has 3 temp probes connected, and source is a 200W switch mode power supply (which also supplies the RGBW dimmer with 40W of lights and capacity to add more RGBW’s…)
I am seeing the temperature flat-line from the sensor after a few hours, or days, or weeks, depending on luck. The only way to reset the temp feed is to power cycle the UBS. I can still communicate with the UBS via the HC2, changing config and the like, so it seems to be the digital controller in the UBS its freaking out seperate to the zwave controller. (this is an assumption, and I have no idea how the internals of the UBS works…)
I have gone from a connection screw block from device to probes, to soldered connections (thinking dirty data from the connection block) and saw no improvement. I have done the factory resets etc…
Anyone else had these issues? Any resolutions? Any ideas?
I have reached out to Fibaro email support and they proved to be consistent with my previous experience of their ability to support their products…
Posted May 29, 2017
Second this…
I’m running a VeraEdge and have several universal sensors that I try to use.
I have the exact same experience as you, or actually worse…
One or more temp sensors will stop working after a random time. The binary sensor itself seems to work fine, but not even powercycle will recover the lost temp sensor.
Posted June 9, 2017
A short update here:
So I replaced the power supply on may 30th, and since then it has really been running fairly well.
I did not reconfigure them at that point, so one sensor was already dead, but the remaining six has worked flawlessly for roughly one and a half week.
(average mtbf before this was half a week or so I’d estimate…)
Yesterday however I had an electrician in, and he had to take down the main power for a minute or so.
This then killed three sensors… two on one UBS, and one on the other…
So all in all I’d say that I find it beyond all doubt that it is related to the power, but ofc it’s incredibly annoying that even a decent power supply is unable to take the UBS’s through a powerloss without errors…
It does also seem like the behavior varies from controller to controller, like I said initially I have to reconfigure the UBS’s, basically an exclude-include process, to get the dead sensors back up.
According to @kelvincoffey, with the HC2, you “only” need to powercycle them…?
Posted December 13, 2018
I have the same issue with 3 different universal sensors. The time to failure varies between ~1 week and 15 months. Sometimes only one temp sensor freezes, sometimes all at once. The only way to get them back is to exclude and include them in my z-wave network (with all the related hassle regarding IDs etc.).
I already started replacing some of those sensors with more reliable ones from another company, at least in some critical applications.
My guess for the reason: Electromagnetic pulses, either over the power supply or “over the air” through the sensor wires.
Posted April 24
Guys,
I have been having the same problem for a couple of years already. I tried every advice I could find online (shorter wires, better power supply, I even go more UBS devices to have my temperature sensors connected as single probe per device)
Nothing works, every now and then I have a problem with “hanging” temperature on one of the sensors.
My configuration is:
- UBS with a single temp probe for a water container
- UBS with a single temp probe for a heating boiler
- 4 x UBS with two temp probes each for room temperatures
- all controlled by VeraLite controller
Every now and then a probe fails and stops reporting a temperature - could be even just a single one from the pair of two connected to the same UBS.
Your call.
