I’m new to ST and smart homes. I have an ST Door Sensor on my mailbox. The sensor worked great in testing before putting it out there, but the mailbox was too far to reach until I put my ST Outlet in an outlet within the house nearest to the mailbox, to relay it. But while it worked okay sometimes then, it also got more problematic.
Sometimes the mailbox sensor will report immediately when the mail is delivered. (A notification on my phone.) But sometimes I see really weird stuff, perhaps the weirdest being that I once realized it had not reported anything all day as of 4 pm, even though the mailbox had been checked several times.(Mail came around noon, I got it; wife and kid may have checked it, too.) So I hit the Refresh button on the Sensor’s Right Now page. Lo and behold, there was a sudden flurry of activity. The Recently page showed 4 instances of Active/Inactive in a row - but they were all stamped as of 4 pm, when I had refreshed it.
I can only think that these were somehow lagged or queued for reporting, somehow, somewhere. Is there anything I can do to avoid this? Or at least can someone explain to me what’s happening?
I am hoping I am such a newbie that this phenomenon (or design) is well known and described in detail elsewhere. If so, where might this be? Honestly I’m a little disappointed that the ST product pages and manuals are so simplistic. As if it uses an Ikea “less is more” philosophy. But this is technical stuff. I don’t want less, I want a ton of details and specs.
Thanks if you can help!
Mike, Atlanta
P.S. I have a new v2 ST hub and I am talking about a door sensor and outlet that came with it.
The first thing you might do is check the logs to see if the hub was inactive (in which case all notifications get queued up and sent all at once when it comes back on line), and if the device itself showed activity.
I had a lot of problems last week with notifications arriving late even though the devices themselves had triggered. It’s just something that happens sometimes with ST.
Will be installing exactly the same configuration tomorrow, so will be watching with interest, and of course providing feedback on my success/failure. Is it possible to bring the mailbox sensor back into close proximity with the hub to eliminate the distance factor as a possibility? The more I read, the more I think I will have to use a range extender or intermediate device functioning as a range extender (power sourced motion detector in the garage).
Thanks JD, that’s a lot to get started with, I’ll take a look.
Jim, yes I could bring it back and it does improve it. Maybe. It’s always very hard to know how much that matters or if it was something intermittent, or even an upstream thing by chance, without lots of long testing.
So I’d rather just ask, instead of spend days trying to figure things out in a vacuum. When it might easily be well known things, and all I had to do was ask.
