For a few years I have been using 3 Aqara motion sensors in my living room which are used for an alarm automation. They have been modified since I got them to reset after 5 seconds instead of 30.
This has been working great all that time, but since a month or 2 they started throwing false positives. Not sure if it happens during the day, but at night it now happened 3 times in 2 months which then triggers the alarm. Highly annoying as you can imagine
It now happened 3 times and each time a different motion sensor detected motion while there was none.
Nothing has been changed on the living room and we don’t have any pets.
I really have no clue why they now started to show this behavior while it never happened before and I’m not sure yet how I will troubleshoot this.
What are the experiences of others with these motion sensors?
I’ve been using several different types of motions sensors for a while with HA and tend to get intermittent false positives with all of them, sometimes it can be down to the battery being a little low and other times I can find no real explanation.
But a good workaround I’ve found is to use Alarmo and set them up in sensor groups.
I have been looking at Alarmo and might use it in my HA environment as it saves me a lot of automations. My motion sensors are already in group. I don’t understand why Alarmo would prevent the false positives though as it is the sensor that triggers the state change or I’m I missing something?
If it solves my issue I defiantly make it a priority to implement.
My sensor types are Aquara / Xiaomi RTCGQ11LM Xiaomi RTCGQ11LM control via MQTT | Zigbee2MQTT
Battery levels of the 3 sensors (as reported by zigbee2mqtt) are 37%, 70% and 100%
And link quality 81, 114 and 117 lqi
This functionality is aimed to reduce the risk of false triggers in your house, which are (unfortunately) a reality - especially with PIR motion sensors.
In a group, the triggering of a single sensor is ignored, but consecutive events (of 2 different sensors) will trigger the alarm.
When you get these false positives, is it a single false signal which lasts for mentioned 5sec ?
Mine sensors recently get false positives which lasts UNTIL I MOVE in front of them. So it’s getting unexpectedly ON at night, may keep that state for hours and turn to OFF only after I really make a move in front of the sensor.
That started to happen recently - last 2 weeks I noticed 3 times. Interesting thing is that I am using Aqara sensors in 3 different houses, separate HA environments, and the behaviour appear in all 3 houses.
Sensors itself rather did not get any update so it’s either HA or Zigbee coordinator to do sth. differently.
It was failing on Deconz/ConbeeII in my case. I switched 2 of these 3 installations to Zigbee2MQTT in last days to see if this phenomenon disappears.
I am using most recent HA - 2022.11.4 and 2022.11.5.
I have moved to Alarmo a week or 2 ago and it is working great thus far. With the requirement of consecutive events I no longer got false alarms in the middle of the night
