Actually, the ST Zigbee presence sensor needs to be pretty close to your hub for it to be detected. There is a timeout setting which you can set for your hub in the ST Web IDE to determine how long it needs to be away from the hub before an event is triggered to say it is away.
Longer duration = less false alarms, but you will be further from home when the timeout finally occurs.
To set the arrival sensor timeout, go into the ST Web IDE, go to your hub, and click the “View Utilities” link near the bottom. Near the bottom of that page you can get/set the Presence Timeout for your zigbee presence sensor.
I have 2 iPhones and 2 ST Presence Sensors and all have worked 99.99% of the time flawlessly for the past 2.5 years as presence sensors. So, I know it can work, but I also realize that others definitely have issues.
I have 4 iPhones, 1 iPad and 1 Galaxy that all have had their share of failed reporting. I had to increase my location circle to include almost a 3 block radius but since then, I’ve had little issues. Presence sensors play a big role in my HA scheme so I know how frustrating it can be when they don’t work.
Using my iphone 6s plus as a presence sensor is completely unreliable. Numerous times a week, including today, I leave the house, travel about 30 miles away and hours later it still says I am home. I have been having this same issue for months now…basically since I started with ST. The other phone on our household has the same issues, just not as often. I have sent in numerous logs for this and ST said they can see that there is an issue, so hopefully there is something they can do. To me, this is extremely important.
It allows you to set it to 0 so I’m guessing it will be 0. The problem is I can’t tell where that timeout would start. 1 mile away, 50 feet away, 10 miles away, where?
Can you please explain how you were able to set the Hub’s Presence Sensor Timeout to zero? When I view the web site, I can only choose from a drop-down list, with 2 minutes being the lowest value possible.
I understand that geolocation works better with wifi on, and yes wifi is enabled, but that doesn’t apply to the arrival sensor.
When it was working correctly, using my iPhone, I barely got to the end of my street before the “goodbye” activity would run. Now that I’m using the “more reliable” (HAHA) arrival sensor I get miles away before it runs “goodbye”.
What “Activity timeout” did you set to 0? I am still not following what you changed or where you changed it.
The Hub’s Presence Sensor Timeout is what ST uses to determine how long to wait, after losing the zigbee signal from the ST Presence Detector physical key-fob device, before changing the status of the “presence” of that device to “away”. If this timeout is set to 10 minutes, for example, you could be quite far from the house before anything would change. I use 3 minutes for mine and do not have any false triggers.
As a separate troubleshooting step, you could create a custom Smart Home Monitor monitoring rule. With SHM you can get a push/SMS notification when any presence sensor “arrives or leaves.” This might help diagnose the difference between Presence Detection issues and Routine Activation.
