Sorry, I realize this is an older thread. But I’m looking into shut-off valves I can integrate into HA. For those who are using Flo, what are your thoughts? I read a number of reviews on Amazon that say it shuts off all the time when you do something out of your routine - like take a long shower.
That seems pretty obnoxious. I honestly wouldn’t want it to shut off by itself at all. I would want to control it 100% through automations. Thoughts?
Moen uses A.I. to determine abnormal usage of water and decide when to shut the valve off. There is a learning period of 7~10 days (I don’t remember) which can be restarted. While going through the app now, I see that the sensibility is adjustable. Mine is at maximum and I rarely have trouble with it. Additionally you can program different period over which you can set thresholds : flow rate, duration of flow and total volume.
I have the valve and water detector for 3 years and it works well. During occasion that I do abnormal usage of water, I set it in « sleep » mode so it doesn’t react. They added a maximum time limit of this mode so you don’t forget it. Before that I created some automations to monitor various aspects including notification if I left « sleep » mode for too long. Beside « sleep » and « normal » there is also « away » mode which doesn’t allow any consumption of water but keep the piping under pressure.
If you intend to do all by automation in HA, then perhaps you could buy basic and cheaper devices.
If you have control over water inlet and have a security system, both connected to HA, you could make an automation to disable water valve control and keep the valve open, in case smoke/fire is detected. Also good to have another automation to turn on all the indoor and outdoor lighting if smoke/fire is detected.
Thank you for the info @chayerd. Are you able to enable/disable the sleep mode through the integration? Or do you only have a sensor to see the status?
All 3 modes can be set via service call. (4th service is to force health test of the water system - piping).
Actual mode is shown via a dedicated sensor in HA.
Valve is controlled by a switch in HA.
See above in this thread the list of entities for full list.
You could do plenty of automations based on various sensors. I just find the default monitoring from Moen quite good and complete including the notification (sms, app, email) so I only did automations to monitor the health of Flo moen such as notification if connectivity (ping) is lost and watching entity going unavailable to trigger reload and then notification if unavailable status remains too long.
I did another automation to warm me if system has detected small leak for 3 days in a row. The reason is the Flo will detect overnight if there is a tiny dripping which can occur occasionally if someone didn’t close fully a tap. Such notification come and go … but now I have HA to tell me if this occurred consistently.
You can see in above thread that the refresh rate of entities might not be quick enough to do automation that need to react fast. The refresh rate in iOS app is better which indicate the moen server could see events quicker too. Depending on your location, refresh rate in HA can vary. In my case the entities go briefly unavailable about 10 times per days.