Hi everyone,
I recently found a simple use for the Self-test button exposed by Matter smoke alarms in Home Assistant, so I thought I’d share it here.
Many Matter smoke alarms expose a Button entity for running a self-test. By itself, pressing the button only triggers a short test, but Home Assistant makes it easy to build a more flexible testing routine.
For example, you can repeat the self-test several times with a delay between each run:
repeat:
count: 3
sequence:
- action: button.press
target:
entity_id: button.smoke_alarm_self_test
- delay: "00:00:10"
This can be useful if you want to turn your Matter smoke alarm into a remotely triggered buzzer for simple notifications or testing, especially if you don’t want to purchase a separate smart siren. Of course, this only uses the Self-test function — the actual fire alarm pattern remains reserved for genuine smoke detection.
You can of course adjust the repeat count and delay to suit your own needs.
I found this to be a nice little use of the Matter Button entity, and I thought others might find it useful too. Has anyone else come up with interesting automations using the Self-test button?
For transparency, I’m a test engineer at Sensereo, but this automation should work with any Matter smoke alarm that exposes a Self-test button entity.