Apologies for yet another Arrival Sensor thread but a search did not find what I’m looking for.
I have two SmartThings Arrival Sensors. I’ve had them a few months and as many report, they have had a habit of doing the left/arrived dance and this is most likely due to Wi-Fi interference although, I should make it clear I do not suffer from interference with the rest of my Zigbee devices as far as I can tell - pretty sold mesh including a plug-in repeater very near the garage where the sensors ‘park.’
The left/arrived dance seemed to get worse as the batteries ran down. I just this past weekend modified both sensors to run off of external AAs as several in here have also done. When I did this I had a slight issue with the sensors rejoining the network even though what I did was basically the equivalent of changing the batteries. For both sensors following the battery mod I had to do a trick I had read about in here whereby I set ST in to add a device mode and then insert the batteries and tap the sensor button (like adding them for the first time). Whether it’s fluke or that’s an actual solution I have no idea but they finally both rejoined and showed as arrived afterwards.
However, only one of the sensors has remained steady in that it is reporting left and arrived as expected (and so far no ghost left/arrived events hopefully as a result of the battery power being back to 100%). The other sensor is acting up though. For the latter the following has happened:
Event one - I left the house. The sensor registered as left as expected. When I got home it never registered as arrived. I had to do to the trick described above again to get ST to see it as arrived.
Event two - I left the house. The sensor registered as left as expected. When I got home it DID register as arrived. Then a few minutes later it ‘left’ and has been that way for hours. I have not yet tried to include it again until I try an understand more of what is going on. I do know it still has power (in other words the battery mod has not failed).
Again, both sensors did left/arrived just fine before the battery mods even if they did do the dance quite a bit.
Any ideas what is going on with this second sensor?
You should also mod your presence sensor to use 2xAA batteries. I have my car in my driveway and it has a modded original SmartThings presence sensor which I wired to a 2xAA battery adapter and the life of this device increased exponentially.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s Zigbee related.
I have an Arrival Sensor on my keychain and I leave the keys in the ignition with the truck parked in the garage (lol not recommended to leave keys in vehicle). Anyway, my Arrival Sensor works and reports correctly 99% of the time. Every once in a blue moon I will get a couple notifications that it has left/arrived when the truck hasn’t moved. This happens maybe once a month, if that. I have had my Arrival Sensor for over a year and replaced the single battery 1x.
I chalk this up to some sort of interference (nothing to do with batteries in my case). It being in the garage and the furthest device from my hub and very few Zigbee devices as repeaters in between. It could be that some sort of heavy wifi process is running that affects it during the time (30 seconds) that it is checking in.
If I were you, I would look at adding a Zigbee repeater somewhere between your hub and wherever your Arrival Sensor is sitting.
Agreed as I noted in my first post. But I noticed it got worse as the batteries ran down. I’m hoping, as others have reported, that the battery mod which holds the battery level higher for much longer, helps prevent the phantom departure/arrivals.
To be clear, this thread was not really about the phantom departure/arrivals - it was more about the fact I had one not arriving period after my mod. It seems I just had to reset it in place as mentioned above.
I know some people posted that they felt that by making the AA battery mod,they think the antenna improved a bit. That could just be coincidental.
You stated that the departure always works (that’s when it is displaying as Present), but you stated that when arriving home that sometimes it doesn’t report as Arriving and that when you are home it sometimes goes Not Present. Even if your mesh is strong, the front of your house and how the signal is received or penetrates walls and different parts of the structure, it still could be interference. You would have to experiement with different placement of Zigbee repeaters. I know someone said that they put something in a 2nd story window and that improved things for them tremendously.
Oh I agree. So far so good with the repeater where it is.
I’ve had no phantom events on the first I modded on Sunday and so far so good on the other since I reset it.
As you say, no guarantee anything is permanently resolved. But the immediate issue I had of either no arrival registering or happening once then leaving and never arriving again has cleared-up for now.
Definitely could all be battery related then. The version I have has been really fortunate based on ALL the posts about people replacing the battery every month or two. A year and one battery change.
