First Alert Smoke/CO detectors and IFTTT phone notifications?

Devices & Integrations
1

Hi, all.

Long time reader, first time poster here…

I’ve owned my V2 hub for about a week and just installed several of the Lowe’s ZCOMBO First Alert smoke/CO detectors. They paired to the hub immediately and I’ve set up the “Notify Me When” SmartApp to send me push and SMS alerts. It’s all working great but I’d also like to receive a phone call if any of the detectors go off.

I use the SmartThings IFTTT recipe to get a phone call if the my water leak sensor goes off, but it doesn’t look like there’s a similar recipe for the smoke/CO detectors. Am I missing something here? Is there a way to cobble together my own ST smoke/CO -> IFTTT --> phone call recipe?

Thanks for any advice.

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I have not found a way to make that happen either. Can someone help?

3

I figured out a way to do this using the Android SMS trigger channel and the Phone Call action channel.

For this to work, you’ll need to enable SMS notifications for Smoke/CO events in the SmartThings Smart Home Monitor (or another SmartApp like “Notify Me When”.) It also helps if all of your detectors are named consistently in ST – for example, Bedroom SMOKE-CO Detector, Hallway SMOKE-CO Detector, etc. When you test the detector, you should get a text message that says something like “Bedroom SMOKE-CO Detector was tested.”

Once all of that is working, create the following IFTTT recipe:

If new SMS received matches “SMOKE-CO”, then call my phone at 1231231234.

Basic steps:

  1. Choose Trigger Channel: Android SMS
  2. Choose a Trigger: New SMS received matches search
  3. Complete Trigger Fields: Enter the Keyword or simple phrase you want to trigger the phone call. In my case, it’s SMOKE-CO.
  4. Choose Action Channel: Phone Call
  5. Choose an Action: Call my phone
  6. Complete Action Fields: Enter the Message to say. Mine is “Smoke Detected at home! New text message from {{ContactName}}. {{Text}}.”
  7. Create the recipe and try it out.

Overall, this works pretty well for me but during a few tests there was a significant delay between the trigger and the phone call – sometimes more than 5 or 10 minutes. Not good. At other times, I got the call within a minute. This kind of inconsistency isn’t uncommon with IFTTT from what I understand.

The ST push and SMS notifications, on the other hand, always hit my phone within a few seconds, which is great.

Long story short, this solution is an OK stop-gap but I would really like ST to add a built-in phone call option so I can cut IFTTT out the loop.

Hope this helps.

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