I just got a couple of POPP Smoke Sensors and they don’t report the battery level correctly (either 100 or 0).
According to POPP support that’s how it is, and they claim it’s fine as the device will send an alarm to other devices in group 2 when the real battery level is low:
Yes it should be possible for hass to respond to those zwave sensors. I don’t usually mess around with zwave associations; all my automation type stuff is handled by nodered. For those sensors, I’d probably setup a fire alarm automation with the fire binary sensors as inputs, and I’d also setup a text alert automation to tell me which battery to replace when it sends the ‘0’ signal. You should be able to use the battery and alarm signals to trigger automations like any other zwave device… but some devices don’t play well with hass. Just have to add it to your controller, see what pops up, and go from there.
The controller will already receive the battery levels from the default Lifeline group (1), so you don’t need to do anything with group 2. In the case of a low battery level, that is converted to a value of 0 in HA. So you can just use the standard battery_level attribute of the zwave entity.
The confusion is that the entity changes the battery_level attribute from 100 to 0 after a random number of days from when it starts to beep locally, and I want to prevent the beeping as the smoke sensors are in bedrooms.
According to the manufacturer, a more accurate signal is sent to that “Alarm Reports” association group, but I’m totally ignorant of Z-Wave and have no idea on how to handle it. How can I “capture” those group alarm signals?
I see… seems you need to use the group associations. The settings are found in the 0zw (zwave) configuration ui. My guess is as good as yours… select the entity, then select the group association stuff, and click send? I figure at least you would have to configure all the smoke alarms to be associated with the same group Id (the one with battery data). Some devices limit the number of nodes in a group… hopefully that isn’t an issue for you.
In the UI, Configuration -> Z-Wave -> Z-Wave Node Management, select the node of the smoke detector you want to receive alarms for. At the bottom, under Node group associations, choose group 2. Under “Node to control” choose node 1, the controller. Then click “ADD TO GROUP”.
Done. But what comes next? Is HA supposed to receive a message from the controller (node 1) whenever the controller receives and alarm via group 2?
No idea really. If the nodes sends actual alarm reports (Notification command class), the controller will receive them. The user manual doesn’t say anything about what reports are sent, and “send an alarm” is about as vague as can be. Maybe you can get more information from support about what exactly is sent?
Normally you’ll have a entity the corresponds to an alarm type. The only one that looks relevant to me is “Power Management”, which has battery statuses. You can find notification types and values in this excel document. OZW adds this entity if the device reports it during the inclusion process. If it doesn’t, I’m not sure if it’s added at runtime or not.
Otherwise, if you have a battery that causes a low battery report, you could use it and watch the OZW_Log.txt and see what’s going on.
