I’m trying to figure out what the state of the art is in 2020 for getting sensors to monitor battery levels of zwave devices.
I setup a whack of Zooz ZSE40 multisensors, Lock and Flood Sensors (all zwave) awhile ago, and at the time I had trouble getting sensors for batteries. Stumbling my way through it, I found the Attributes Add-on, and added this to my config which created a sensor for each zwave device, automatically named based on the original device and adding the suffix _battery_level for each:
Is this still the correct thing to do in 2020? Want to make sure I’m not missing something easy here to switch to that reduces the # of moving parts I have to do something simple as tracking battery life of my sensors.
I have an easier setup that won’t leave out any batteries as long as there is a good naming technique.
I list all batteries but you could filter for Zwave and batteries.
I recently stated using the auto-entries card, and it is great. I don’t have to go back and edit my cards each time I add a device, it is just done auto-magically.
Thanks for the info on the card itself. But for the battery level sensors themselves, are you creating them in the same way as I am? I’m not seeing zwave device battery levels exposed automatically unless i’m missing something.
All mine have been automatically exposed. I just utilize customize.yaml to put friendly names on them.
Most of my Z-Wave devices are AeoTech, I can’t say what other manufactures do but battery level seems to be a common data point.
The only non AeoTech battery powered zwave device I have is a Smoke/CO listener, but it also reports battery level.
On your Z-Wave integration click the “xx entities” link; it should list all your zwave devices and every thing they report. Beyond that you may have to look at the configuration of the devices and tell them to report (if that option is available).
You actually have the info you need.
Instead of attributes (which is a valid way to do it) you can use sensor.playroom_multisensor_battery_level. You can do that for every device but as I showed using the Auto Entry card is by far the easiest way to do this.
Digging in on this further, when looking at SOME of my Zooz ZSE40 multisensors, there are no entities exposed for battery levels. But other ZWave devices do including other ZSE40:
E.g for my basement ZSE40 multisensor, notice lack of battery level entity/sensor:
To try to fix the problem ZSE40, I excluded it, then factory reset it (pressing the action button 10 times within 10 seconds). I then re-added it, which then showed more sensors/entities. However, battery is still missing as a sensor!
Here is the info from dev tools (notice battery level is shown as an attribute):
I’m still having issue with the battery level entity not being exposed but since it’s a different topic than what I originally posted about, I started a new thread here: