I switched from SmartThings six months ago or so because my devices kept dropping off the hub requiring devices reconnection. I use Aeotec motion, door and water leak sensors. Under the Developer Tools I see the temperature is updating regularly, but battery status last updated 3 months ago for the devices. I suspect this is a limitation of the device? Or can I tweak a setting in Developer Tool? If not how will I know when a device is out of battery? Of course with the motion sensors linked to lights that fail to trigger the lights that will be obvious, but for water leak sensors there’s no way to know. Will Homey send me an alert when a device goes offline? Homey is powerful but for a newbie like me it’s confusing. thanks for any help here!
No. It’s very weird, but Homey has no “mark device as offline after x minutes of inactivity” setting or the like.
But,
because of the great community, there’s several ways to work around it:
There’s a great script which you can run every X hours, it shows you any inactive sensor devices.
Another way is to (re)start a timer every time a sensor value, like temperature, is changed. Setting the timer to 12 hours f.i., makes it possible to determine if a device was inactive during 12 hours straight.
To quickly determine if the inactiveness is battery or communication related:
For every device there’s a notes field available, for you to save the battery replacement date for instance.
Battery status is more a gimmick than a serious measurement. The usability depends on the device or app.
F.i. Aqara contact sensor battery levels stay at 100% all the time, but temperature sensor battery levels ate reported pretty realistic.
