Just looking to clarify, do you need the Govee bridge or app at all if you’re monitoring the sensors through an RF bridge or radio?
I’m wondering if I could just purchase the 5-pack of sensors and get them connected to HA through RF. These sensors seem like a great solution for me, connected monitoring plus a built-in alarm.
Nope, just the sensors should be enough
ive been following this thread, would it be better to just use a water sensor connected to gpio pins of an ESP8266? I guess then you don’t get easy long battery life
I don’t see why not. I have seen people also use the Wyze contact sensor reconfigured as a leak detector. This thread was mostly started for the people who already had the Govee ones and wanting to utilize them somehow with HA. Though they are pretty easy to setup if you have an RF Bridge so a simple solution that doesn’t require any hardware tinkering.
I had originally considered something like this, specifically using a contact sensor like @smoysauce mentioned. Ultimately, I decided I wanted something with an audible alert not tied to Home Assistant. Having dealt with water leaks in the past, I wanted to reduce the number potential failure points to make sure I am alerted in a timely fashion.
That is a really good point too! The Govee sensors have built in sirens.
I’m curious if they chirp or anything when the batteries get low, since I haven’t been able to figure out how to get battery status in HA.
According to at least one Amazon review, they produce a really annoying, consistent chirp which can only be stopped by replacing the batteries. I’m hoping to get the battery status reporting to work in general, but especially if the claims of this review are true!
I plan to run some tests by hooking a sensor up to my adjustable power supply and simulate a low battery situation. I’ll report back with my findings.
According to the manual that came with mine (from this 3-pack + hub) it says the low battery alarm on the sensor flashes a red light and makes a “dududu” sound. Whatever that is 
That would mean I would have had to read the manual! Ha! Looking at their site you are right, it does alert for low battery. Also it shows the button is a “Mute/Test” key. So I am guessing it must send the battery level code every-so-often when connected to the official gateway (unless the gateway has a way to poll the sensor), but I do notice when I push the button, the RF bridge picks up a code which makes me wonder if that code is the battery status. So maybe it sends a “gross” status of High, Med, Low and just need to figure out which code correlates to what. I’m now curious again! I’m eager to see what @DeltaNoir finds!
I finally hooked up a sensor to the adjustable power supply to run some tests. Unfortunately, I haven’t discovered any new codes which correlate to the battery status. I don’t have the Govee Gateway, so I am unable to test if the Govee app shows the batteries are low in these tests.
I did discover the sensor itself audibly alarms about the low battery when the total voltage of the batteries drops to 1.8V or lower. It takes about 5 seconds for the sensor to register the low battery state once the voltage reaches 1.8V. The audible alarm is quieter than the water alarm and sounds similar to a kitchen timer. When the low battery alarm is sounding, the sensor sends an “FC” code every second.
I have yet to see an “FD” code that others have reported. So, for now, the battery reporting is still a mystery.
Thanks for trying it out! Good info to know. I am guessing the FC has to send the power status as it seems to be sent when it is first turned on and then every second on a lower battery. Hmmm…I may try to look at it in portisch to see if even though it’s the same “hex” code, if the portisch code differs; if you have portisch it might be worth trying it with low voltage too.
Did you ever connect your sensors to the Govee gateway, or did you just start using them with HA? If so, I am wondering if some of us are seeing the random FD as maybe that is a signal to the gateway to check in?
Has anyone seen FC codes without manual interaction? I have 5 sensors and I’m not seeing any codes being broadcast without some sort of interaction (putting in batteries, pressing the button, water detection). If the Govee app is tracking the battery level over time, I don’t think it’s through FC.
I’m not familiar with Portisch. Will it work alongside ESPHome? I’m willing to give it a try with the adjustable power supply.
None of my sensors have ever been been connected to the Govee gateway. You may be onto something about FD being associated with a gateway ping. I wonder if that is a battery status of full and is only triggered when the sensors are connected to the gateway.
I am trying to see if I can get the bridge to write it’s console log to an excel file or something as with tasmota it isn’t persistent and clears itself so it’s tough to track over time.
Portisch is actually a firmware that you load onto a different chip on the RF bridge that allows you to view the “raw” code. This is the video I followed, it’s pretty simple: Video
Not sure how it works with ESPHome as I use tasmota, I would assume the same, but I am definitely not knowledgeable enough to say for sure!
I can report back that putting in older batteries (which show as one line missing in the battery indicator in the app), I got 3 FC messages 10 seconds apart.
Also, when I put the original batteries back in, I got 5 FC messages, and the battery indicator went back to 5 lines.
So, my hypothesis is that the number of repeated FC messages indicates the battery level, and I suspect it only gets transmitted when the battery voltage drops by a set amount. But I will continue to investigate.
Interesting. I wonder if one would be able to replicate the message to have the Sonoff bridge send the FC message to see if the gateway picks it up and reflects the battery level?
So, I am still not convinced as to whether the number correlates to the battery level - but it definitely is sending out more FC messages when the battery does not have 5 bars in the app.
As far as the base station querying the sensors, I think this can be ruled, as after removing the batteries from the sensor for multiple hours, the app is still happy to report the battery level as 4 bars. So this is DEFINITELY only a receiver.
Interesting. I was not seeing this FC code behavior with my tests on power supply. I would only see one FC code when I powered the sensor, until I reached the 1.8V threshold which set off the low battery alarm. I’m going to continue tests on one of the other sensors to see if there is a difference.
I also managed to get Portisch installed on my bridge alongside ESPHome (thanks for that rabbit hole, @smoysauce 
), so I’m going to see if it picks up anything additional.
No problem @DeltaNoir! Haha…I actually figured out how to setup the logging to send the logs from the RF bridge to a Syslog server, so I will have to check those out to see if I notice any patterns.
Yeah, I am kind of re-thinking the message frequency approach - for one thing, in the app after swapping out batteries, and immediately refreshing the screen, the new battery level already appears (if you don’t do a manual refresh it will update after some extended time).
I’m now seeing similar behavior to what @sw99 is seeing, even hooked up to the power supply.
When I turn on the power supply, I receive 5 messages, the first 2 are FA and last 3 are FC. They come in 0.5 seconds apart. Then, 2 minutes later, there are 3 more FC messages.
I’m wondering if this is a red herring, because I see the same pattern, regardless of the voltage supplied. If when I set the power supply to 1.8 V, the 2 FA and 3 FC messages appear, then the low battery alarm goes off.
I’m also not seeing any advanced codes with Portisch.