Fix a Siren?

Devices & Integrations
1

Before I go into the specific problem I want fixed, I need to explained how it happened…

The short, short version is that my SmartThings malfunctioned partially earlier today, in the worst possible combinations…

It started while I was driving home from work, my wife called me, and I instantly knew what she was calling about. See I could hear our siren going off, so I knew two things:

  1. Her arrival didn’t automatically turn of armed mode as it should have.
  2. She was very angry.

I told her that she could turn it off using the SmartThings app, to which she angrily interjected that she could not get into it due to an error.

Though I was driving, I told her i would turn it off. I attempted to run the app on my phone and got the following:

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I tried clicking retry but got:

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And trying again I got:

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And so on…

Keep in mind as time passes she’s getting angrier.

My only remaining though was to try to talk my wife though “Logout” and log back on… Needless to say when I tried to explain this to her, I only got a few words in to the steps I wanted her to try when I heard a sequence of sounds…

First the alarm got louder, then I hard this clicking crunch type sound followed by the tone of the siren shifting pitch…

Hindsight being 20/20 the sounds were: My wife walking up to the siren, tearing it out of the wall and walking quickly with it in her hand. This was followed by the sound of a faucet turning on, immediately followed by the siren becoming muffled, and then going quiet with only the sound of running water remaining…

Needless to say, she found a way to stop the alarm that worked: Immersing it in the sink…

I spent the next several minutes pleading with my wife who was now threatening to add both my $99 SmartThings hub AND my recently purchased $175 Samsung HD Pro camera in with the siren…

She hung up which lead me to do something else I probably shouldn’t have – racing home.

I was fortunate enough to find she hand’t gone though with the followup immersions, but she indicated if I spent any money on buying a new siren, it along with the rest of my SmartThings hardware would all get a bath…

So: Does anybody know how to fix a waterlogged siren???

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OMG. Dying from laughter. Sorry your siren got a bath but ST failed big time today. I really hope things get better.

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3

No… But I recommend attaching a SmartThings Leak Sensor to the replacement so that you will be notified if it also gets submerged.

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This is one of the reasons why my siren is still sitting in the box.

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5

I feel your pain. :scream::umbrella:

I just posted a response in the thread about the smart things cloud crashing today that one option to consider if you want to use sirens is to get a Z wave siren that supports association.

You can then associate to a Z wave switch that supports association, and I think also to a minimote, and switch will be able to turn off the siren even if your wife puts the smartthings hub in a bucket of water. :sunglasses:

That is, zwave association allows two zwave Devices to talk directly to each other, totally locally, even if the hub itself is off-line. There are reasons why you don’t want to use that every day, but it’s a really nice Plan B for a lot of situations.

The two devices will have to be within one hop of each other.

Anyway, I just wanted to mention it, because as you noticed, the smart things mobile app uses the smart things cloud to talk to the hub. So when the cloud is unavailable, you can’t use the mobile app anymore. Here are the posts that discuss the brand options I just mentioned.

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6

Sorry to hear that, that’s really painful

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this made me laugh because I could hear my wife doing this…only the siren would probably have gotten thrown out the door.

I am frustrated that I cannot count on ST to be my replacement security system. i get far too many false positives, and often have the same issue with logging into the app. I have a siren, but have never got it to work (due lack of messing with it), and im actually glad its not working because I can only imagine the aggravation of it going off in the middle of the night.

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Love the story @bobbythompson.

I actually had a similar story with my SIREN going of late in the evening when my wife and I were feeding at the time our 1 year old baby in the kitchen. Get this…the SIREN was hanging right above the kitchen door when it went off. I was still on hub v.1 when this happened. My wife and I frantically tried to get the damn thing to stop. My wife was furious. My baby girl was screaming and crying…Long Story short. My SIREN learned 2 new tricks.

  1. Flying out of the Kitchen door and hitting a concrete wall in the back of my yard.
  2. Learning to Swim as it landed in a puddle in my back yard…Because it was raining.

I have partly fixed it as a hobby, but it still sounds like someone is choking a cat. LOL!

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9

Same scenario for me except my wife took the siren and buried under pillows in another room. She is used to the system and it not working ask three time.

Needless to say, the siren is coming out because Smartthings just isn’t ready to be a security system yet. I may make use of it as an indicator when the garage doors are moving unattended. I’ll stuff cotton and tape over the speaker to quiet it down.

Yesterday’s system problem was an epic fail when you can’t manually turn off devices like sirens.

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Their is always the drowning of the SIREN!

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11

Unbelievably, my siren actually survived!

I set it up so it sat with the holes for the speakers down so it would dry out over night.

When I got home last night I was able to test it & verify it works!

In going back though my Siren settings, I did notice I had it set to shut off after 3 minutes, so I’m wondering if it actually shut itself off as opposed to being drowned out…

Of course now I’m torn as to weather or not I should leave it on…

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The grinder/disposal might be next :slight_smile:

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