I’ve recently moved the door locks back to ST (from Abode Security) because I wanted to have only one z-wave mesh in my home. For couple of weeks things were going well, until this morning.
After ST promptly put my home to sleep by triggering “Good Night” and locking the doors at 11:43PM, at 1:05AM the door was unlocked but the event was never recorded by SmartThings.
Here is what SmartThings recorded:
And here is what Abode Security saw (zoom in to see the time):
Ya the idea of a smart lock is appealing but if the system randomly decided to unlock the door then no thanks.
And reason #852748497 that SHM is complete crap! Use it at your own peril!
That’s undeniable, but sleeping in action was a BIG surprise for me. If the dag on lock stopped working, I could understand…but where was ST at 1:05AM?
It’s the weekend! It’s like they all go home on Friday and the ship sinks on the weekend…
Very very sad.
The only reason I have sensors on my doors is to control the lights.
I have to be the one to ask “why”. Why Bobby, why!? Why would you re-connect your lock to ST given all the current issues!?
Well I did it right when it started, because I had a good run without issues for almost 3 months…So I thought things are settled.
Did it miss that contact sensor on the door too?!?!
I’m afraid I don’t understand the trace of events you posted.
Did the lock actually lock at 11:43pm? (i.e., do you know that the bolt was thrown)? If not, then it is not unusual for a Z-Wave command to be lost, and should always be verified with a Contact Sensor. It is essential for all doors with connected locks to have a Contact Sensor to ensure that you don’t throw the bolt into air because the door is open.
Do you have any indication of when the door opened? What’s the contact sensor event log say?
Do you have SHM or some other alert monitoring on the Lock and Contact Sensor that could have alerted you that the Lock and/or Contact Sensor had opened during a period when you should be “Armed (Stay)”?
No, that’s Abode’s contact 
I kicked ST out of the house. But that was a good question, though! I do have ST z-wave motion outdoor…And it did record the motion…
Yes, I physically confirmed
Yes, my wife opened the door at 1AM she is in the picture but I left her out, don’t tell her I cut her out of the picture… Also Abode’s contact shows door opened at 1:02
I do, never got an alert
So… we all know that SHM is still broken; it is a published known issue, so I don’t understand why anyone is using SHM at the moment until the problem is officially cleared…
Am I wrong to conclude that the only “pants down” in this situation is SHM?
Do you mind If i look at your account to see what happened?
What SHM has to do with an actual event of a z-wave device?
Not at all. Be my guest. I’m PM-ing you my user id…
Say what?
It should be very unusual for a zwave command to be lost altogether, that’s the whole point of mesh. A message may bounce around the network for a little while, but it shouldn’t get lost.
Even more true for a message sent through a beaming repeater as a message will be held until the lock wakes up and asks for it.
If messages are getting lost, either you don’t have a beaming repeater near the lock, or you don’t have enough repeaters, or something is really, really wrong.
But under normal operations there should be no need to put a second device on the door to protect against lost messages.
The Issue of not wanting the door to attempt to lock when it’s open is a different issue. There are use cases were somebody might find that helpful. But it doesn’t have anything to do with lost messages.
“Unusual” is a subjective term; certainly in Community homes, we have plenty of indication of sub-optimal Z-Wave and ZigBee networks. Whether this is a problem of the base hub radio, interference, or “un-repaired” networks, is open for investigation … but network issues are a challenge that must face all of the products based on these networking technologies.
The situation of not throwing a deadbolt on an open door is a critical case. Unfortunately, most smart locks do not have any way to verify that the bolt was thrown into the latch, and not outside of it (unless it gets a jam error 
). Frankly, it should be inherent to the DTH for all Deadbolt Locks that a closure sensor be mandatory.
Regardless, I don’t see the case of a lost message in this example. The door was commanded to Lock at 11:43pm and it did. Where’s the lost message?
I just see that SHM failed to notice the door unlocking. Is that due to a lost message or SHM failure?
These are important to walk through, but the details are critical; glad @slagle has access to internal logs to help trace the situation.
And… redundancy never hurts. In the case the Z-Wave Lock is “unlocked” message gets lost (either from a network issue or SmartThings), home security is significantly enhanced with the addition of a single inexpensive closure Contact Sensor on the door. It won’t help if the root cause of no alert is a broken SHM, but at least the state of the door is verified without a video camera.
I know where my money would go…
Redundancy never hurts–but hardware redundancy costs real money. 
Systems where hardware redundancy is recommended for some use cases are one thing. But to say that it should be mandatory for all cases is to significantly increase the hardware budget on every project.
Just sayin’…
BTW, at my own home we have the smart lock set to autolock. So we never lock it from the network. We just unlock it from the (not ST) network. So we don’t have the “critical case” that you mentioned. “All home automation is local.” 
Where do you see that? I didn’t show the SHM logs. Who cares that SHM didn’t alert me? I certainly don’t. BUT I do care that ST platform was blissfully unaware that my lock was unlocked at 1AM. I have other ways of getting notified if SHM fails. The problem is, that the lock didn’t exist in ST world until the sun was up…
