Aqara Water Leak Sensor not working

Questions & Help
21

I would like to clarify something before someone buys new water leak sensors, even if it is not necessary, maybe.

As a result of the bad incident from Kay, I was wondering if my water leak sensors are working or not. I check my smoke detectors (Abus Z-Wave, SHRM10000) regularly, but I have never tested the water leak sensors.
All in all, I have three different water leak sensors in use:

  • Fibaro Flood Sensor (Z-Wave Plus, FGFS-101)
  • Aeotec Water Sensor 6 (Z-Wave Plus, ZW122)
  • Aqara Water Leak Sensor (lumi.sensor_wleak.aq1)

So yesterday I tested two of the three sensors, the one from Fibaro and Aqara.
First I tested the Fibaro sensor . As it starts to beep when it comes into contact with water and an LED starts to flash, it was clear that the sensor generally works. However, I didn’t receive an automatic push notification, as is the case with smoke detectors. Then I looked in the Homey app and noticed that a yellow and black exclamation mark is shown in the device tile. Ok, so Homey has detected the “water leak” after all, but hasn’t send a push notification.
I noticed exactly the same thing with the Aqara sensor, so it also worked without any problems.

Until yesterday, I wasn’t aware that you have to program a flow for water leak sensors. Until now, I always thought that an automatic push notification would be send even without a flow.
I don’t know if this has always been the case and if this is what Athom wants.

Therefore again the question to @Kay_Kretschmer, did you created flows to get informed?

Regarding the general Zigbee problems, especially with Aqara devices.
I have 4 Aqara sensors in use, as already mentioned the water leak sensor and the temperature & humidity sensor and they work without any problem.
In total I have 39 Zigbee devices including 18 routers (INNR, Philips Hue, SONOFF, Tuya) and 21 end devices (Aqara, IKEA, Philips Hue, POPP).
After a firmware update, my two IKEA TrÄdfri Kadrilj roller blinds are unfortunately causing sometimes problems. However, the problem is solved when I manually raise or lower them once, repairing is not necessary. After that they work without any problems, like all the other devices

1 Like
22

Hi Dirk, sorry for the late reply. I did not program a flow, since when I tested the Sensor, it showed the yellow exclamation mark in Homey. Hence, I postponed the flow programming. I have other Aqara devices as well (Temperature) they work fine. Once I resetted the Water Leak Sensor, it was shown that it has left the network, Once I tried to add it again, I got notified that it is already in the system. I then tested it if it works and it did work again.

I have opened a Ticket with Athom, but havent heard back yet. I will keep you posted.

KR
Kay

23

Hi Kay, no need to apologize!
I just wanted to mention that not every time Homeys Zigbee is the problem but a missing flow.

But as I understand you right, you are pretty sure that sensors lost the connection to Homey, right? Did you check the Homey APP every day during your vacation to see if a water leak sensor had a yellow exclamation mark? Or how did you check that? To be honest, I wouldn’t have done this as I would have relied on receiving an automatic push notification.

24

Hi Dirk, with 3 kids and massive workload, the flow (even this small one) was pushed off the to-do list onto my bucket list :wink:

But yes, I am sure that the connection got lost.
Homey shows the last Alarm from the sensors as 7 Months ago and the second point is that Homey still shows the sensors as available (including full battery) though I took the batteries out :slight_smile:

1 Like
25

@ all: I’d like to recommend this “last-update check” script. You can run it, like, every 12 or every 24 hours.

Then you’ll be notified as soon as a sensor is “quiet”, which indicates it doesn’t respond anymore.
Somehow this is not built into Homey’s zigbee system, which is (very) necessary imho.

3 Likes
26

That’s correct. But I like to state: It’s not an Aqara issue, it’s a Homey issue!
But, tbh: Aqara has it’s own ideas about zigbee ‘standards’ just like Tuya, which can cause unpredicted behaviour.

I have Aqara contact-, temperature- and motion sensors paired with zigbee2mqtt, and it’s rock solid.

1 Like
27

Thanks for these insights.

I cannot say that I have the same experience. I am using several Aqara devices:

  • Multiple Door & Window Sensor T1s (lumi.sensor_magnet.aq2 and lumi.magnet.agl02)
  • Multiple Motion Sensor P1s (lumi.motion.ac02)
  • Multiple Water Leak Sensor T1s, as a binary sensor for pressure mats (lumi.flood.agl02)
  • A Vibration Sensor (lumi.vibration.aq1)

I have them connected to a Homey Pro 2023 since July and still working as expected.

Maybe I am lucky
 Knock on wood. :blush:

28

Thanks for sharing the script. Agrees with you this should be part of Homey Zigbee implementation.

From reading the homey community almost on a daily basis, I see very mixed feedbacks about Zigbee and Homey. Some very happy and others saying it’s completely broken. As we all know, those ones that are unhappy are usually those ones writing about it but I’m wondering how much data Homey has on this to understand the issue better. More importantly, if they have data, how reliable the data is.

After reading what @Kay_Kretschmer wrote above, I wonder:

Does that mean that if Homey is collecting data about Zigbee issue, this particular one would not be seen as an issue :thinking: :man_shrugging:t2:

I personally didn’t experience issue with Zigbee or at least that’s what I thought until now. 2 weeks ago I had a similar behavior with two zigbee devices but their battery were empty so I didn’t blame Homey for it because I knew it was the battery. However, similar to the issue reported here, my HP23 still reported them online and Sensor values were just not getting updated anymore. I thought it was by design but it should not be like this, even with an empty battery.

Even if this issue only affects 5-10% of their customers (random number), Homey should still be investigating this. Enabling more diagnostics, send surveys to know more info (is it related to specific brands of devices or Homey models, specific configuration with or without zigbee routers, ghost zigbee devices that requires a network reset, zigbee routers that were added after enddevice
)

I know it’s less exciting than releasing a new feature but it’s probably as much important, if not more important. If the conclusion of the analysis is that only 1% are impacted and the reason is xyz, at least we will all be clear on it.

Maybe that’s something that Homey could drive with their community. After all, that’s also one of the benefits of having a good community.

29

The Z2M zigbee controller has a built in availability check feature, because of the nature of zigbee. It’s odd Homey doesn’t have this check:

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When a battery or when mains power is removed, it cannot send an update, so the controller doesn’t know.

Sensors cannot be ‘pinged’, while they’re in sleep mode when they don’t have updates to send.

Maybe Homey has an hidden “regard device as offline after x minutes” function, but I’ve never read about it.

_
No clue how many % of Homey’s have zigbee issues.

30

Yes, it has been always the case, a flow is required. It saved my bathroom once.
A regular check it’s good, and a number of times I found the Aqara had to be re-included. Fibaro never missed a beat

1 Like
31

Zigbee and Z-wave are considered as more sophisticated then KlikAanKlikUit because of the 2-way communication technology. Appearantly it makes no difference to Homey.:cry:

32

Hello everyone. I have previously used Aqara on a large scale. For good reason, I have sold all Aqara devices and standardized on Z-Wave. Of all the devices running on Zigbee, in my experience, Aqara is the most unstable, and of all Aqara’s devices, the water sensor is the worst. I still have some Zigbee devices left, mostly from Ikea, but no more than about 10 units. None of these are critical, such as fire or water sensors. This experience comes from and is the same for both SmartThings and Homey.

33

OTOH, my Aqara devices have worked very well for many years now (including various water leak sensors) with zigbee2mqtt. So YMMV.

34

Oh well, I opened a Ticket with Athom, they replied to get them the Diagnostics from the App. And since it is the Aqara app, they closed the ticket and pointed me to the owner of the app.
The IT circle of live. Always somebidy elses problem


35

Unfortunately, the same crap over and over again, but I am sure that Athom knows about the problem and that the problem is not just due to the Aqara products or the Homey Aqara app.

@Doekse, could you perhaps say something about this? This “This is not our app, please contact the app developer” annoys the users and makes them helpless.

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36

and the developers, who are getting passed the blame for things they cannot fix :rage:

3 Likes
37

I can totally understand you and your fellow developers @robertklep. You all build cool apps, make the Homey platform consumable for “normal users” and when something goes awry, Athom points to you guys
 Shitty move, but well known.

In the end of the day, Athom will loose customers due to this behavior. I am currently thinking, because of the damage done, and Athoms response, to switch platforms. The only thing holding me back right now is the fact that I don’t have the time to take the necessary steps to evaluate new platforms and to port all my devices over to a new setup


And: here the reply from Athom:

Hi Kay,

Thank you for your reply.

*Unfortunately I can’t open the app log because we didn’t develop this app and can’t see background information from this app. *

I would advice you to contact the app developer so he can find a solution for you. You can reach him via this link: Aqara App for Homey | Homey

For now this is all I can do for you, which is why I’m closing your ticket.

I wish you a great day and a lot of fun with Homey!

The lot of fun with Homey might be limited to drive over it with my car :smiling_imp:

2 Likes
38

Just thinking out loud but can the developer of the App share the logs with Athom?

I think part of the reason that annoys us when reaching their support is that they close the case faster than Lucky Luke. In some case I understand but in this particular one, he / she could have said, please contact the developer of the App, request them to provide us the log and I’ll keep the case open while waiting for it.

39

There are, most likely, no logs.

This issue (Homey losing connection with Zigbee devices) has existed for a long time and Athom is unable to fix it. Instead, they blame the app developers for something that those developers can’t do anything about because connection handling is done by Homey itself, not the apps.

1 Like
40

In that case the response from Athom support is indeed unfair