I currently have SmartThings running several devices in my home. However, I have been searching everywhere for an all-in-one reasonably priced zwave door alarm. Out on my shed, I have a $12 door alarm attached to the inside of the door. It’s a padlocked door and when I open it up, the alarm chirps and gives me 30 seconds to enter the deactivate code (4 numbers) on the keypad. If correct, it disarms - however if incorrect 3 times or the 30 seconds goes by it sounds a very loud 110db alarm. This runs off a 9V battery and has a magnetic sensor that can be placed on either side to detect when the door is open (similar to those available now with zwave communication). I can easily arm it again before closing/locking the door by entering the code on the keypad.
I want the same functionality from a device that I can connect to my SmartThings via ZWave or something. This way if the alarm goes off, I can be notified or trigger other actions - like a strobe alarm or something. I really need this to be located out in the shed and don’t want to have to deactivate or activate it from my phone or in the house before going out there.
I cannot find this device and was wondering if there is any way to accomplish this with existing hardware or if anyone knows of this being under development somewhere?
If all you need is an alarm every time the door opens, in general it’s pretty simple: put a z-wave or zigbee contact sensor on the door, and a siren nearby (most connected sirens I’ve seen are z-wave). Set a custom alert in smart home monitor to alarm when the door opens.
But if you want a delayed siren that can be disabled by a keypad, ST doesn’t make it easy to set that up. You probably could with the smartapp CoRE. There are several threads already in which people discuss how to setup an alarm with entry delays. There’s also a version of the smartapp Smart Alarm that I believe was modified to work with entry delays; there’s a thread on that too.
Also, how far away is your shed? That may end up being the most difficult barrier to overcome.
There are a couple of different ways to approach this. One would be to keep the set up that you have now and, assuming you have mains power in the shed, just add a Leeo acoustic sensor.
Hopefully the siren you have now is of the type that the Leeo would recognize, and if so, you can get notifications directly from it and you can also use its IFTTT channel/service for indirect integration with SmartThings.
The Leeo has a list price of $49, but quite frequently goes on sale for 29.
It works quite well, and a number of community members are using it to monitor leak detectors, CO2 detectors, etc. because you only need one Leeo for anything within hearing range, which can reduce the total cost of the project. The Leeo also has the advantage that as a Wi-Fi device, it has a much longer range than Z wave.
Of course if the shed doesn’t have mains power, then that won’t work, but I thought I’d mention it.
The alternative is to use multiple devices, which means the cost is going to go up pretty quickly. There are some all-in-one Z wave devices, but they’re only sold as part of specific security systems, and they are not compatible with SmartThings as they have additional proprietary features.
So that means you end up with one keypad device (either the Lowe’s Iris zigbee keypad or a minimote 4 button or an android tablet) +1 siren plus a door sensor.
That still doesn’t give you exit and entry delays, though, because SmartThings doesn’t support them in the official features. Which means you would need to use Core to put everything together.
And as others have mentioned, there still the range issue depending on how far away the shed is.
So I think it might be possible to get the same functionality, but it would be quite a bit of effort and cost to set up.
