Both the door sensors and motion sensors that came with my Smart Things kit are currently stuck. This seems to happen so frequently that they’re pretty much useless for any reliable automation.
By Stuck I mean a door sensor shows its closed when the door is open and the motion sensor shows no motion when I’m waving around in front of it.
WTF???
I’ve followed the advice in the faq about unplugging the hub and removing the batteries but this does nothing to remedy the situation.
Similar conversation happening over at link below. Things to check. Have they ever worked? How long has it been since batteries have been replaced? Please respond in other thread.
You removed the wrong bateries. Take out the bateries from the sensors. If it happens frequently, you may need to look into getting a repeater.This happens to me when I reboot the hub.
Could it be a range issue as well?
Try taking out the batteries on the device for 20 seconds or so. I had this happen to me alot a few months ago, but recently been much better. I have found if you “search for a new device” as you remove the battery on the device it seems to repair it more often.
Zigbee does run the risk of interference of the 2.4 ghz spectrum. Make sure you ST Hub is not right next to your router or in a cabinet that could be blocking signals.
I did get a couple of lowes smart outlets to boost the mesh. I have only installed one on a different floor than my ST hub (directly below it) and it seems to help with the sensors on that floor. I believe it also helped with the main floor sensor reliability too.
I can’t have anything that works this unreliably as part of my house. Just closed the door and this “sensor” says its still open and last activity was 44 minutes ago.
There’s an iris zigbee plug 15 feet away and the hub itself is maybe 30, through 2 walls. The Smart Things multisensor is a freaking joke as far as I’m concerned. Working “sometimes” is as broken as never working at all.
Both of these POSes are going in the trash. So is the zigbee occupancy sensor that came with the ST kit, which is also wildly unreliable. I wish I would have just bought the hub and not the kit with these useless sensors.
I just pulled both the open/close sensor down from my door and the motion sensor off the wall. Brought both over within 5 feet of the hub and they still don’t work. Stuck open, and no motion. Freaking useless. Perhaps I will try to get ST to return my kit and just buy the hub.
Did you pull the batteries out of the sensors for 1 minute and then put them back?
I just measured off distance from the hub to the sensor, its about 23
feet, and the repeater is 12 ft. Was wondering about 2.4ghz interference so
I switched the channel on my wifi hub. Pulled the batteries from the
sensors and reinstalled.
Last event 1 hour ago for both devices. By that I mean still stuck. These things haven’t worked for 24 hours in a row since I bought them. My time spent debugging is worth several times what I paid for this junk.
Your experience isn’t normal. Something else is going on here. How far is your hub from your router? Changing the channel is not enough, distance is the only solution IMO.
What do you mean by this? Are you seeing new events for motion and open/close?
Also, how do you determine that sensors are stuck? Are you going only by the events listed on the ‘recent’ tab, or do you have automation that is not working? I noticed that ‘recently’ tab is not updated on time. See screenshots below, while motion is active, my recent activity was almost an hour ago. That doesn’t mean my sensor is not working.
Ok well, this issue is solved.
As much as I’d like to skulk away from this thread like it never happened I’ll explain.
I hadn’t been able to get these zigbee sensors working reliably for about 2 weeks. Earlier today I read a thread about removing and re-adding zigbee devices after having de-powered your hub and removing the batteries from it, then waiting 15 minutes and re-powering. I did that, plus I added a zigbee power outlet/repeater, and was able to re-add the devices and they appeared to be working in the locations where I wanted them. Win!
That was this afternoon about 1pm. When I went to try one of my automations after sundown it didn’t work. I looked at my zigbee sensors and they were frozen once again.
Broken again!??? I somewhat lost my sh*t.
But… in the last few minutes I discovered that no ST commands were working. WTF? I went back and looked at the hub and it was flashing red. WTF again? I picked up the hub to look at it and discovered my problem.
Turns out when I de-powered the hub earlier today I put the batteries back in but didn’t plug in the power. It’s been running on batts all afternoon. Fresh batteries and plugging it in and everything works again, even my zigbee sensors!
Yes, I’ve seen this discrepancy too. Both between the event firing and reporting in the app, and in the API web interface. According to ST support the event fires in a timely fashion but the app and API logging may take a moment or two to log.
I think sometimes being a member of the community makes you a tinfoil wearing suspicious person always thinking ST failed (don’t worry it does for real from time to time). The other day I almost wrote a post about ST screwing up a piston, but it was me miscalculating the time zone. Oops.
