I bought about 6 of them a couple of years back and they have been hit or miss with reliability and battery life. I expected 12-14 months battery life out of them but rarely get even close to that amount of time. I’ve got one now which is draining the battery in full within days (have gone through 5 batteries, two different packages, one pack brand new). Have repaired my z-wave network multiple times, and the one at issue sits right next to one with an older battery right now.
Plus I find they frequently go offline for a minute and return back online. Happens so frequently that I’ve gotten numb to the notifications and don’t realize when a battery dies and they are fully offline.
My single ZSE42 ate a couple of batteries quickly–until I took steps to improve the Z-Wave mesh, which (probably) kept its radio traffic to a minimum by avoiding protocol retries and let the device go back to sleep sooner. In my case, installing an in-wall S2 switch nearby to control the basement lights did it! I uninstalled the ZSW42, installed the wall switch & paired it to the hub, then re-installed the water sensor holding in nearby the wall switch. Also be sure to do a ‘Repair Z-Wave network’ afterward…
Yes, it’s paired with S2 security. (I did this last summer and, IIRC, the pairing went smoothly.) You might want to try it in closer proximity to the hub?
Thanks, just did. I scanned the QR code to pair. Initially I was getting messages that it wasn’t paired with security, now I didn’t get any messages. Even right next to the hub, it was having trouble getting it the right driver. Not sure what’s going on. I went from 100% battery to 23% after pairing.
Did you load the Zooz Edge driver for this device from their driver channel? That should be done before pairing. Instructions on their website, I believe, but instructions are also repeated in the first post in that thread…
I have a bunch of these and haven’t really had any issues, except for the offline message you’re getting. That happens on all my water sensors, not just the Zooz. The offline message started happening right around the platform change and the new edge drivers. As far as the battery, maybe get a zwave repeater. Might be that the sensor is just out of range and it’s desperately trying to stay connected, eating up the battery. If you have more than one, try swapping them and see if the issue stays in that location or follows the device.
I’m going to keep experimenting, but I’m running out of batteries quickly. The one I paired last night was dead by morning. Interestingly it never went offline which is somewhat frustrating as it gives the indication it’s still there monitoring just fine. For something like a leak sensor, I want to have some confidence that it’s working…
I suppose I could have a bad batch of batteries, but these are from two separate packages, neither of which is Duracell which I read could cause issues.
I suppose it could be a repeater issue, but I have two other sensors in the vicinity, and I kept this one near one of the others overnight last night.
I’m going to try a third batch of batteries, re-pair it, and leave it right next to the hub to see what happens.
It would be really handy if the SmartThings people would put a “route” option back in the new advanced page. In the old IDE you could see the route a device took for ZigBee to get back/forth to the controller. If they could put this back for ZigBee and also do this for ZWave it would really be helpful. I’d like to see how the devices are communicating and what path they are taking.
Battery drain is definitely not normal so there could be an issue with routing or the hardware. We’d recommend reaching out to Zooz support for assistance and possible warranty service if needed.
We reported the random offline report issue to ST engineers a while ago and they’re working on a solution. We confirmed with them that there’s nothing that could be changed on the device firmware or driver code to help address it, looks like it’s a platform issue as @ericreed5280 pointed out.
