I "made" a floating (zwave) swimming pool temp probe

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11

Hi, thanks for posting this, it is exactly what i had been looking for. I have managed build it and connected it to my HA system running on an rPi.

I have found that the reading does not update though until there is a significant change in tempreture. I can leave it in the pool for days on end and it will continue to read the same temp, but when i remove the sensor from the pool, within a few mins the reading will update and then when i bring the sensor inside the house (air conditioned) it will update again after a few mins.
Has anyone else come across this issue?
Thanks in advance for your assistance.

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12

Yes I had the same problem, I changed a setting for the sensor and got it to update every 15 minutes. It was a bit tricky. When I get chance I’ll try and retrace my steps and let you know.

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13

My pool is about 50 feet from my house do you think zwave would work? I could maybe put a zwave switch in my shed but that would still be 50-60 feet away.

14

With my setup I get a range of about 50 feet (max) with the receiver in the house and even then I get the occasional missed reading when the sensor has floated to the far end of the pool. Z-wave can mesh with other z-wave devices so that might help. It also depends on the structure of your house.

15

Yes, this is common for battery powered devices. To speed things up you can manually wake the sensor up by quickly pressing one of the tamper buttons three times, that will transfer your new settings to the device.

One of the settings is the update interval, try fiddling a bit with that too find an update frequency that works for you.

16

Pretty sure the Fibaro sensors do not update by default unless the temperature delta changes significantly (I think the default is 2 degrees C) Ot can be changed to auto-report every x number of minutes, but that tends to drain the battery considerably. One consideration might be to determine just what type of temperature monitoring you wish you be doing. Do you need to know the exact temperature every 15 minutes? Or would adjusting the default from say 2 degrees to a single degree be sufficient to keep good track of your pools temperature. Overall just keep that in mind when considering battery life.

17

Greetings all,

Apologies for bumping an old thread, but this looks like something I can take on as part of my learning of home assistant.

As this is my first post, this may be a really basic question, but if I’ve got my server running on a RPi3 and I’ve managed to setup a couple of simple lifx devices so I know I’m on the right path.

If I have the 2 components listed, do I need to also have a Z-Wave hub to allow the sensor to communicate back to the software? If yes, any recommendations for a cost effective device for this?

Thanks,
Pav

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18

Did you ever tackback what the setting was that you adjusted to get the reporting interval to 15 mins?
This looks so totally awesome :ok_hand: :clap: :clap: :clap:

19

Very cool… looks like you can no longer get the FGK-101 in Canada; only the newer FGDW-002 which only has an internal temperature sensor.

Any recommendations for a similar device that supports a DS18B20?

20

I’m ordering one from Amazon.com to Toronto, its about CA$70 with import fees and shipping (link). Expensive for sure, but, it’s such a nice setup vs other ways of doing this.

21

I would also like to know the settings used to get the reporting interval to 15 minutes :slight_smile:

22

Were you able to find a similar device or a spot to order the FGK-101? Looks like amazon.com is all sold out now as well.

23

Check out this from Climax in Zigbee and Z-Wave:
https://www.climax.com.tw/new/z-wave-ts.php

24

That does look like it might work, but I don’t see them actually being sold anywhere. I just found on other boards they only deal B2B with a minimum order qty of 100 pieces. I only need 1 :stuck_out_tongue:

25

I’m just about to order poolsense. On the face of it, it looks outstanding and only about £150. It reports temperature, chlorine and pH, all via sigfox (some kind of satellite iot) so no connection concerns. It’s a ball that floats in the pool made by a South African company. There is also home assistant integration. I can’t see any comments from users but we’ll worth a try.

26

Brilliant idea!
I have the same pool floater…
Since you posted long time ago…

Whats the right, good way to do this nowadays? And is also cheap?
Not willing to spend much for that.
Preferable with zigbee protocol

27

hi, which zwave gateway do you use for this sensor? an usb zwave dongle or an zwave gateway?

28

I found on Amazon one of the older versions of the fibaro sensors with the contacts in them but I have yet to get any device handler working that works with the contacts on the new Smartthings app, anyone have any luck with it? The Fibaro built in handlers do not work at all so I found a generic zwave handler that is a door window sensor with temp and the sensor part works but not the temp probe.

29

I did manage to buy a Fibaro FGK-101 Zw5 Door / Window sensor and connected a DS18B20 temperature probe.

How can I get the temperature to be displayed and tracked? It does not show up in the entity list. I tried expluding/including the device, even a reset of the door sensor.

The temperature probe seems transmitting the data, it just doesn’t get displayed/tracked.

When I dump the nodes data I can see:

{
        "id": "7-49-2-Air temperature",
        "nodeId": 7,
        "commandClass": 49,
        "commandClassName": "Multilevel Sensor",
        "endpoint": 2,
        "property": "Air temperature",
        "propertyName": "Air temperature",
        "type": "number",
        "readable": true,
        "writeable": false,
        "label": "Air temperature",
        "ccSpecific": {
          "sensorType": 1,
          "scale": 0
        },
        "stateless": false,
        "unit": "°C",
        "list": false,
        "value": 31.25,
        "lastUpdate": 1631284388795,
        "newValue": 31.25
      }

I can also see the temperature in Z-Wave JS → Fibargroup (node name) → Multilevel Sensor (7-49-2-Air temperature] Air temperature).

Why would HA not pick this up and display in the dashboard. I would like to track the temperature changes as well.

I am using the latest version of HA.
Any advice would be appreciated.

30

Same thing here, no more display of temperature with fgk101. It worked few month ago, but i had to reinclude the module recently and since that, no more temp and a lot of “unknow” sensor in entities…