I have a tiny dog that, despite all of my best efforts, still sneaks into a closet to eliminate. My goal is to catch him in the act, but he’s very, very sneaky about it. Hence, I would like a z-wave motion sensor set very close to the floor to detect when he enters this closet so I can interrupt him and redirect him to the right place to eliminate (Which is my wife’s shoe collection. Just kidding, outside.) I have looked at some z-wave sensors, but many of them are the “multi sensor” or are specified to be “pet immune”, which would defeat the purpose, obviously. Do any of you have a recommendation?
“Pet immune” is mostly a marketing term. Due to the physical mode of operation, a PIR sensor can’t actually distinguish a pet from a human. It just sees heat differentials. They just tweak the internal sensor sensitivity and detection window timing to ignore heat sources with a smaller cross section in typical install locations for PIR sensors and call it ‘pet immune’. But in the end it’s mostly a factor of how large the moving heat source appears to the sensor from its point of view. If you mount a PIR sensor at floor height right next to the door, your little doggy will appear like a huge source passing right in front of it and it will trigger it, no matter if pet immune or not. Worst case, just crank up the sensitivity a little.
A very nice highly configurable zwave PIR is the Fibaro FGMS-001.