Could someone advice me what I need to do to make my doorbell z-wave capeable?
I was thinking to connect it to the Fibaro universal binairy sensor, but have no clue what to connect to what.
From the doorbell push button I have 2 wires, one connect on the trafo and one attached to the blue wire from the actual bell. From the bell itself there is also a red wire connected to the trafo and below are the 2 wires for the 220V. Please note the trafo above is not used.
Anyone has a suggestion where to place the universal sensor?
For English only speakers like me, trafo == transformer, in Turkish.
I’m pretty sure that the Fibaro Universal Binary Sensor will not tolerate 220V directly. With such a sensor, you’d have to use a relay between the switched 220V and the sensor. Here’s one way to do it. But that seems like a lot of unnecessary work to me. Yea, I’m lazy.
There are two other alternatives:
Using a Fibaro Door/Window sensor directly connected to the door bell button, with all 220V disconnected from the circuit, you would have a Z-Wave doorbell button. The issue with this is that you no longer have a standard doorbell.
Fibaro includes a diagram of this in the door/window sensor manual.
Place a Fibaro Door/Window sensor against the electromagnet that activates the bell’s striker. When the electromagnet is activated, the magnetic field trips the reed switch in the Door/Window sensor. There is not direct connection between the Z-Wave sensor and the existing bell system. Due the configuration and location of some bells, this method may bot be possible.
This guy taped the sensor to the bell. He failed to realize that he could have simply stuck the door/window sensor to the outside of the doorbell cover. Also, he could have made it fit under the cover much better if he had used a small external magnetic reed switch with the sensor. Use NO(Normally Open) type.
My first thoughts on seeing the photo are “THROW THE LOT AWAY”. Everything looks horribly exposed and if the 220v is not touch proof then it is an accident waiting to happen.
If you want to follow Z-Waver’s idea to take the bell push to a Fibaro window sensor and lose the 220v trafo then at least it will be safe.
I bought a door/windows sensor off Amazon. The sensor is to big to fit in my door Bell box in the hallway. The door/window sensor has a connection inside for two wires. I had a contact left over from when I installed my DSC alarm system so I wired a contact and set the contact on top of the coil inside my doorbell box and set the sensor on top of the doorbell box. My doorbell box in the hallway is up high so you really don’t notice the door/window sensor setting on top. I setup a notification and now when ever someone pushes the doorbell I get a text message.
This was a very easy setup. Like I said I just put the wired contact on top of the doorbell coil. The magnetic field that the doorbell creates to ring the doorbell also closes the wired contact. The next thing I want to do is setup a camera to take a picture and email it to me when someone rings the doorbell.
the input of the relay (3v-30vAC) is wired in parallel with the chime. This was done at the transformer where all of the wires are routed and kept away from the chime itself. the output of the relay is then wired to the input of the Z Wave sensor. Now when the Doorbell button is pushed and the current is sent to the chime it is also sent to the relay and sets off the sensor.
[quote=“Steve78163, post:5, topic:188789”]I used the door sensor with the wired input
and added this relay from Amazon
the input of the relay (3v-30vAC) is wired in parallel with the chime. This was done at the transformer where all of the wires are routed and kept away from the chime itself. the output of the relay is then wired to the input of the Z Wave sensor. Now when the Doorbell button is pushed and the current is sent to the chime it is also sent to the relay and sets off the sensor.
So far it works very cleanly.[/quote]
Why do you need the relay? Can you just connect the doorbell wires directly to the door sensor?
It might be possible, but the sensor is not really designed to accept 24 volt input. When the doorbell circuit is closed it might damage the sensor. I didn’t want to take a chance on damaging the sensor.
If you try it and it works let me know. Using a simple cheap relay isolates the sensor circuit and insures it won’t get damaged.
Hey Steve, can you send or post some additional picks of your setup? Looks clean and straight forward. I only have one question, where do the orange wire go? Blue and yellow hit the sensor, white over white and white over black go to the door bell switch, I think???
Due to the fact that I have LED’s in my doorbell buttons the relay always sees the current so I had to switch to the “Normally Open” (N/O) circuit that uses the Orange rather than the blue. When the button is pressed the relay triggers and I get an event in Vera. I basically set this up so that when I am away from the house I set the sensor to “Armed” and I get a text if someone rings the bell.
Hey Steve - I am trying to replicate your setup, purchased a Fibaro door sensor and the suggested relay. Unfortunately, I am not having much success getting the sensor to recognize the doorbell push. Do you happen to have a full wiring diagram that shows the connections to the doorbell, the chime, the transformer and relay? I put a voltmeter on the orange and yellow - not pushed it is at zero, as expected. pushed it stays at zero, which I would expect a voltage, hence triggering the sensor. This is why I believe I have something wrong in my wiring.
Sean,
You should not getvoltage across orange and yellow at any time. The orange and yellow should go to the relay normally open contacts so a continuity meter will be better for testing. The coil of the relay is wired across the coil of the solenoid of the bell.
Hi, Thanks for the stories. I had been planning to simply trigger something in z-wave from an existing doorbell, as you have here. After pondering the options I took to using a cheap video door entry (in place of the bellpush), and using the ‘voltfree’ contact pair from the video door entry to activate a window sensor (by soldering wires in parallel with the reed switch contacts (normally open) inside the z-wave window sensor.
I did have to supply 12v power to the video bell but I did that using the existing wire for the previous wired bell.
Now I have internet accessible video door entry with two way voice, with the doorbell used to trigger z-wave
Why?
Well … the app that runs on my smartphone for the video door entry would otherwise have to run in the background, soaking up battery on the device. So instead the z-wave triggers a scene which has an associated notification, the notification goes via VeraAlerts (great plugin, thanks guys).
My mobile phone has the VeraAlerts set as a source of push notifications, but not Vera itself (too many, not flexible config). So… finally, VeraAlerts allows selection of five sounds (as well as many other nice features) and I have recorded and use the sound file of the actual doorbell…
so now my … phone notifies me of the doorbell being rung using the doorbell sound from my phone (to me anywhere in the world), I can then open the app for the video and audio link and remote call to my caller.
The key to this setup is
A door entry system with voltfree contact to relay the doorbell activation.
Use of VeraAlerts plugin to filter and transform the notifications into exactly what I felt was appropriate
Ding Dong!
Photo shows exterior installation onto a purpose built wood plinth and the messy half finished interior with WiFi arial Z-wave modified sensor plus LAN connection.
Best Home Automation shopping experience. Shop at Ezlo!