Presence sensors: erratic and unreliable

Absolutely. I’ve had this problem a number of times.

Arrival sensors that sit stationary in my house will mysteriously depart and arrive – sometimes numerous times. (And my hub is not near my wifi router, the hub is fairly close to the usual ‘resting place’ for the sensors when they’re home, and there’s no obvious source of wireless interference.) The really odd thing is that - when the sensors truly do arrive at home - they are remarkably accurate and have fantastic range … out to the sidewalk in front of my house. Why they go wonky when sitting still, inside my house, near the hub, is a mystery.

When combined with the frequency of misfires in my other SmartThings hardware (i.e. my MP sensors erroneously thinking a door has opened, and motion sensors erroneously sensing motion), it really damages my faith in my system and my ability to trust it for home security.

In my most recent support chat on arrival sensor issues, a really helpful ST support rep suggested that I try changing the presence timeout via the IDE. Here are his instructions:

Click on My Hubs and you’ll be taken to your Hubs info page. If you have multiple Hubs, you’ll have to select which Hub you’d like to modify. Scroll down and click on View Utilities. Under Presence Timeout find Update Presence Timeout (Minutes) and click on the drop-down menu. We recommend you try 5 minutes to start but you can increase it up to 10 minutes. Once you’ve selected the new timeout from the drop-down, click update. To verify the new timeout, you can click Get Presence Timeout.

I haven’t had mine changed long enough to know if it actually makes a difference, but it can’t hurt to try.