I bought a Vera Lite + 2 On/off switches and 2 Smoke detectors from Everspring.
Very easy detection with the “tripple-click” on the devices, and the GUI of Vera.
On/off switches works without any problem …
Smoke detectors though…
Maybe I am missing something.
Conclusion of both of them worked flawlessly.
Then after one day one of them started giving a BEEP every 5 minutes or so… Annoying!
I know that the devices “sleep” and only wakes up once in a while.
I noticed suddenly that Smoke detector 1 was at 30 % battery … (after 20 hours of use!?) … Is that causing the beeps?
I changed the battery and it went to 100% … After 2 hours down to 30% again and beeping…
Am I missing something here?
I have problems when I put one of the detectors at its “spot” (roughly 7 meters away from Vera Lite) (It is not seen anymore by Vera)
Anyone else have experience with these Smoke detectors, that can help/tell me how they should be configured ?
Yes, where I ordered them (www.zwave4u.de) it says that one battery is supposed to last for one year, so there’s definitely something wrong in your case…
Since a few months I have 6 of these in my home, using them with a Vera2. So far all 6 perform well, I have no connectivity issues nor any sign of the batteries draining any faster than they should. I’ve not configured any settings after including them in the Z-wave network.
Is the smoke detector that cannot be seen by Vera at 7m also the one that drains its batteries really fast? Perhaps that unit is faulty.
The one not draining battery is the one 7 meters away.
Yesterday I did the following.
Deleted both devices from Vera (UI5) …
Brought both smokedetectors close to the Vera… Included both of them again (no issues here)
And then I lost connection again… No battery status… Vera constantly saying “Waiting for wakeup to configure device”
Run a repair, waited more than 10 hours… Still the same…
… I did though disconnect the battery from the “draining” one, since the beeping every 30 secs. annoys me
Just to see if I was fed up with bad lock on battery devices, I tried to connect my Leak sensor from Everspring.
Worked absolutely perfect… Include, 1 min later, battery status, if I trigger the flood alarm I instantly see it in Vera…
After the night, Leaksensor still at 100% and no issues…
Could I be so unlucky that I received 2 faulty Smokedetectors ??
I have received my two smoke sensors yesterday. So I can not tell lot about the battery usage, but they ran for about 14 hours and the battery level is still the same.
Usually when you see “Waiting for wakeup to configure device” vera has not yet configured the device. Then the device has to be woken up again manually. This happens a lot with battery powered devices.
When I added my smoke sensors I also had to wake them up again after connecting them with the vera. To wake up the sensors again just push the button three times again (just like you did when including it). Where “Waiting for wakeup to configure device” is shown you will then see a couple of things running through and it will then disappear completely.
…so just wake up your sensors again and see if the “Waiting for wakeup to configure device” disappears…
Tried to triple click the link button and push configure… Now it shows battery etc…
That helped.
Now I will move the detector step by step towards its position to see if it will stay OK
I just don’t understand the whole communication thingy… Can you Poll your devices? How can I be sure it’s “communicating”
Even the one with battery issues… This one I have disconnected (battery is not in the detector) …
But in the UI I see it as “Green” - Eh?
A quick test to see if your sensor is communicating: Make a little fire in your room…
I am at work at the moment, so I can’t really do any testing right now. But if I got that right there is a test button on on the sensor, I figure if this is pushed the icon should become red in the User Interface. Gonna test that tonight (depending on my desire for beer this evening it might be tomorrow…)
No, I can not poll my sensors either. I think you also have to wake it up manually to poll it.
And it is not really surprising that the icon stays green even for non connected devices. There’s just red and green, and this icon is not supposed to show if a devices is connected or not.
What I am wondering, how were you able to see the battery level If the sensor was not configured until now? Maybe you don’t even have a battery problem…
And how did you see that? “(It is not seen anymore by Vera)”
Oh well, now my “working” smoky is almost at its position, and I still see 100% battery.
So guess this one is okay… (will know later… ) Perhaps tomorrow at our housewarming party someone will start a fire, so we can see if it beeps + showing alert in the UI
The other one (Draining battery bastard…) I don’t really want to play with this one since it is beeping every 30 seconds with both the battery included and the new one I tried in it…(And that is if it is connected to Z-wave network or not…) And this annoys me
Will try a brand new battery again later, include it, configure it, and then see how it goes…
Perhaps I should contact Everspring regarding the battery-eater to see if they are aware of any of their devices doing the same (Thinking wrong wired or faulty hardware somewhere… )
I really love all the bad words you are using for your battery draining bastard! ;D
But it’s true, the battery eater seems to behave quiet strange, especially it the not so hungry one works fine. As you already said, give it another last try…
Brand new battery in the SmokeIdiot… Include, Configure - Battery status OK.
So SmokeHallway and SmokeIdiot were both Green and with 100% battery time… Wow… I got this far…
I just tested the SmokeIdiot and SmokeHallway by pressing the button… A loud noise came which got my girlfriend to almost die… (did it at the dinner table, hehe) …
I instantly saw it got red in the UI …
So at the moment everything works! … I even received an email saying Alert from both devices.
Perhaps it helped calling it Idiot? =)
I don’t know if I dare to rename it to SmokeBasement…
Thanks a lot for your help! Will see in some days if it everything stays this way…
I am glad I went for the Vera solution with the fast replies you get in here…
