Pre-order Strips by Sensative at 10% OFF (US Version)

Not at all.

Strips are under 3 mm thick. The battery is proprietary to the company. They didn’t pick off the shelf components and then lay them out in a particular way – – they designed new hardware.

And, yes, they have a patent on it. :sunglasses:

Sensative has one base patent granted on the home market, Sweden. The Swedish patent essentially prevents anyone from manufacturing, marketing or selling a thin, wireless, magnetic alarm sensor on the Swedish market, thereby clearly signaling that the home market is secured and that broad claims are allowed by a respected patent office.
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The corresponding applications, containing a range of features, are pending in important countries. The claims in these applications can be directed to different features depending on what the competitors implement. In their patent applications, Sensative targets not only features that are considered important for their product, but also features that potential collaborators do not have in their portfolio, thereby ensuring that the mutual benefits are also reflected in the IP.

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Do Swedish patents apply here? Place your bets on it it just being a standard coin cell battery…

International patent agreements means that the patent will be honored (backdated to the date of the first patent granted) after the appropriate applications are made, which as you can note from the article I quoted is being done.

And no, it’s not a standard coin cell battery.

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Why isn’t every other contact sensor as thin as this one then?

I agree $60 is a lot for a contact sensor, and I’m super tempted to buy some. For now I’ll just deal with the ugly little boxes that sit on my door and window frames. But why not give credit where it’s due?

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Just bought this on Amazon for my side outdoor PVC Gate after having my ST open close sensor report open and close events all night long blasting Sonos alerts outside. Wife woke me up at 430am thinking someone wasn’t breaking in lmao. If you factor in battery replacements over the next 5 years these sensors are probably same price as other door sensors.

Hope it works good!

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Mounted mine last night in my PVC fence Gate. It took me awhile to find the right spot since the magnet can’t be more than 3.5mm away from the strip, which wasn’t fun in 30 degrees :slight_smile:

Probably the easiest device I ever paired with Smartthings and love the fact it’s waterproof and outdoor rated.

So far so good. Does anyone know if the battery reporting is accurate?

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The only issue with battery reporting we’ve seen so far is from 2 users who got 25% being reported after just a few days. It turned out to be a software problem when Strips reports 25% despite the battery being full whenever it experiences range issues. We recommend doing a network repair and waking the sensor up manually during the process to fix this. Let us know if you have any other questions!

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Just a warning for those using these outdoors in cold weather climates…in NY, we just had a Nor’easter with 50-60mph wind gusts and the strips did not perform well and are still flopping “open” and “close” statuses even though the winds have died down. I have two of these on my PVC gates on both sides of my house. One is about 20 feet from my hub, the other one which you see from the screenshot below is a good 60 feet away and is the more problematic one. Obviously going through brick, sheet rock, etc. This is similar to issues I’ve had with the ST multi sensors as well for these gates.

I am sure this has to do with the zwave signals themselves. I do have zwave powered switches close by the more problematic one and have a relatively healthy zwave mesh network. YMMV.

Hi @Mbhforum, did you include the sensor close to the hub and moved it or did you include it at its target location? If you moved it after inclusion, it’s best to repair the network AND wake the sensor up manually so it can report its location to the hub. Or just try adding it from where it’s installed, this way SmartThings will learn its neighbors and will find the best route to reach it.

Thanks. I included it by my hub but have since done repairs. My repairs usually fail by another device. Everything works well though on my zwave network.

If you repair network without waking the Strips up manually, the repair will likely not affect it. That’s why we recommend repairing the network and waking it up or excluding and re-including from its goal location, otherwise SmartThings will not route the signal correctly.

Unfortunately that didn’t help. It could actually be my rattling from the wind. You can see from my pictures above how it’s mounted.

It also looks like the magnet is mounted on a metal part of the gate - correct? That metal piece definitely doesn’t help signal either. It would probably help if the sensor was mounted above it.

It needs to be as far away from any metal as possible, otherwise it will distort the behaviour of the magnet. I would move it, and raise the magnet with some kind of plastic base to get it closer to the strip.

Unfortunately, due to the gap between both sides of my PVC fence, I had to stick the sensors there. It was literally the only place that registered open/close properly. This wasn’t an issue until it got windy the last week.

Looking at the logs closely, it may be the wind rather than range since it looks like the sensor just registers open status randomly but it seems to go back to normal (closed) right away. Unfortunately, if the gate doesn’t stay in place during strong winds, then this will happen. There are sensors out there with stronger magnets which allow for a bigger gap, but these magnets are 5-10 times bigger than what Sensative comes with.

Let us know if the sensor displays any other symptoms.

So after about 6 months of outdoor use, one of my strips is reporting 1 percent battery. This is the same one I’ve had many false positives with and had to actually disable alerts for recently. Any ideas if this might be defective?

Did it start dropping gradually from 100 to 1% or did it just drop to 1% all of a sudden? This may be an indication of communication or configuration issue rather than an actual battery problem. The best way to find out would be to bring the sensor close to the hub and re-include it.

As far as I can tell, it wasn’t low before since I get alerts via Simple Device Viewer if something falls under 20%. I believe it’s completely dead/defective now as I took it off my fence and brought it right in front of my controller. Placing the magnet on the rounded edge didn’t light up the LED. I’ve done this before, so I know the process. My other one on my other fence is working fine. Perhaps this one has always been defective which is why I got so many false alerts.

How do I get this replaced? I purchased it through Amazon via your store.

You can request warranty service through our customer support, just contact us with your original order number and we’ll be happy to assist you: https://www.thesmartesthouse.com/pages/contact-us