I’ve read a few older posts about good door and window sensors but wanted to see if there’s anything people today have found to be good devices.
I’m a big Fibaro (Z-Wave) fan but have two of those that don’t update their status, they stay stuck in their previous state until you open and close it again and even that doesn’t always resolve the issue. I set some parameters, like temperature reporting and wake-up time, to be more frequent but it doesn’t really rectify the issue.
I picked up some Aqara (Zigbee) sensors and so far they are offline more than online, despite the fact that they are within 10 feet of 2 or 3 other mains powered devices that should easily provide access to the otherwise solid Zigbee network.
Had them for about 7 years. Sometimes they’re a bit flakey in that they get stuck in the previous state but that usually only happens after node neighbors get updated while these are sleeping. I did recently have an issue with one of them triggering the cover tampering status randomly and frequently, but that was resolved by re-interviewing the node. After 7 years, only one of them (the most frequently used door) is down to 80% battery. The others are reporting 99% battery.
I also have their motion sensors which are pretty solid and reliable.
EDIT: the random tampering status is due to a hardware failure. I haven’t determined if it’s because the plastic case with pushes a switch is cracked or otherwise not pushing on the microswitch, or if the microswitch itself has failed. It seems like any vibration like the door opening/closing or vibration in the frame of the door causes it to trigger. Only one of them does this so it’s not a feature of the door sensor, just a hardware failure. Anyway it doesn’t affect the operation of the sensor, just a minor annoyance.
Anyone using the Matter over Thread Aqara door contact sensors?
I really want to start building out my Thread stuff, but need some people who have them to chime in with reliability, battery life etc.
Works great when it works haha. It would go offline from time to time (on HomePod2’s thread network) and pairing matter devices sometimes is painful though. The battery is intensely wrong.
I recently got a Zigbee one from Sonoff, which works great too but is much cheaper.
This might not be an error, but a feature to save battery.
The important part here is if they work if you open the door/window when they are offline.
Staying online consume battery and the registration as offline, might be a misunderstanding in Zigbee integration and not a fault in the sensors.
I have 31 Aqara door/window sensors, in Z2M and have worked fine for years, they never show offline, unless the battery is dead - I have to replace the battery about once a year.
That might be.
Maybe never firmwares have increased the deep sleep cycle to get even longer battery life or they use a new code to only reconnect, when they have state updates. I do not think the protocol have a require update interval, so integrations need to counter for such behaviour.
I tried that repeatedly with no difference. I even replaced the battery in case that was it. Maybe I have a lemon. I bought a three-pack, perhaps I’ll try another in the pack and see if it acts differently.
I use ZHA but that shouldn’t make any difference as far as it’s ability to show as available unless the Z2M has some definition for these units that ZHA is missing.
I’ve used the Aqara contact sensors for multiple years now with ZHA without issue. I have one contact sensor, out of 25, that drops out a couple times a year. Both zigbee and ZWave use the 2.4G wifi band, so you do get better performance if you put your wifi at one end of the band and zigbee at the other end. Where easy to do, I use physical sensors connected to GPIO pins as that gives the best performance.
One of the reasons I also favor Z-Wave over Zigbee. Zigbee has it’s place and I do use it, but I’ve found battery devices to be better on Z-Wave generally. I’m looking at Zigbee sensors just because my luck with Z-Wave so far has been iffy only for these door/window sensors (motions sensors and other stuff seems to be fine).
I’m dealing with the same issue. I get them working and they do for a while and then they disappear. I think I’ve put them back on my HA Yellow four times, and within hours they’re gone.
I just ordered their Matter version, which arrives Tuesday. So if that works (not using my Aqara E1 hub) then I may ditch the hub and go all Matter. I don’t have that many devices (two at the moment covering doors our ADT system doesn’t monitor), but would like to add more if I can get them to work.
I suspect it might be the weak signal of the E1 hub, but don’t want to invest in a new Aqara hub if I don’t have to.
2 devices?
That might actually be the issue. Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter are mesh network devices and generally have pretty poor signals. The network rely on a mesh to provide multiple connection path and to shorten the jumps between connection hops.