In my home, the windows can either be tilted open (leaving a small gap) or fully opened, and I’m using Shelly Wave Door/Window sensors that detect both contact and tilt.
This distinction is important: when I leave the house, I want to be able to leave some windows tilted open without triggering the alarm — since it’s not a security risk. But if it’s cold, or I’m monitoring indoor climate or air quality, I do want to know if a window is even slightly open. In short, a tilted window isn’t relevant from a security point of view, but it is from a climate one.
Unfortunately, it seems that this kind of window behavior isn’t fully supported by Homey (or HomeKit/Home Assistant). As a workaround, I created a virtual device using Device Capabilities, with:
• a boolean field for open/closed state
• a text field for the type of opening
I’m also considering adding a second boolean instead of the textfield, to distinguish between fully open and tilted open, but I’d love to hear your thoughts or suggestions on better ways to handle this.
You might want to consider also using a vibration sensor, like the Aqara Vibration Sensor, that also includes a tilt and angle sensors (screenshot is is Dutch, hopefully you get the picture):
So in my opinion there is absolut no need to create additional boolean or text variables. However, I don’t know your flows. Sometimes it makes definitely sense to create additional variables.
If you use the Homey App Heimdall for the surveillance, unfortunately you don’t share this information, then it’s possible to configure the corresponding windows in the Heimdall App so that they are only monitored when full surveillance is activated, i.e. not partial surveillance.
It is also possible to add or remove the Shelly window sensor from surveillance depending on the status of the window. There are also suitable flow cards for this in the Heimdall app available.
I just learned that the Shelly door/window sensor used by the topic starter, also has a tilt sensor. I was not aware of that. My assumption was that it was a standard door/window sensor that can only sense an open/closed state. My bad .
Thank you! Yes, I have an Aqara Vibration Sensor, and my initial plan was to use it together with a contact sensor (which would’ve been easy since it supports Matter via Aqara’s hub). However, using a single device like the one from Shelly is a cleaner and simpler solution.
Thanks! Yes, I’ve configured a flow that works exactly like that, but it’s just used to update the variables in my virtual device. This way, I can easily see at a glance whether a window is fully open or just tilted, and I can reuse that logic in other flows without repeating all the steps each time.
However, I’d still like to know if there’s any kind of standard or common practice for handling this type of window setup — even just among Homey users.
I don’t think there is any kind of standard or common practice for this. I’ve been active on the Homey forum since 2019 and haven’t seen anything in the English and German-speaking forum section.
To check the states of the window in one device tile without the need to „open“ the device with a long press, you can create an AVD with the Device Capabilities app like you already did.
In my opinion, the problem with this is that you then have a double device and it’s not possible to hide the original one. The AVD also offers also no advantage when creating flows. Furthermore, you have to rely on the DC app to work perfectly.
.
