Shelly H&T Gen 3 unavailable timeout

Configuration
1

My core situation is that I’m using HA to drive my domestic heating. To do that, I needed thermometers in the rooms at a reasonable height.

I chose the Shelly H&T gen 3 because they report every 5 minutes on USB power and they look nice.

However, I wanted a warning if any of the temperature sensors failed for any reason… as that’ll mess up the heaters. So I set an alert for “unavailable” state.

Now, I know that the timeout on zigbee is 10 minutes, but I pulled the power on one of the Shelly’s (which is wifi) and it still hasn’t gone unavailable after 30 minutes… and HA seems content with it.

I have a feeling that this is because the units, on battery, only report every half a degree when they’re on battery power, and HA might not hear from a sensor for who knows how long.

However, I can’t see any setting in the integration to control this.

That’s an obvious problem for me, so I’d be grateful for thoughts as to how I get around this… or more likely other options to replace the Shelly’s that take USB power, look nice on a table (preferably tell the user what the temperature is) and I’ll get a swark if they go off-line within about ten minutes.

2

This is a bit crazy. It has been without power now for more than an hour and HA is still not concerned.
I’ll have to resort to pinging and going disconnected for 10 minutes or something… but how I put that into a “visibility” for an element i’m not sure, because there’s no option to add “disconnected for…” to a condition that’s within a visibility for a picture card.
Hmmm…

3

Shelly HT Gen3 (and Gen2) is a device that sleeps most of the time. If the temperature or humidity doesn’t change by the threshold (you can set in the device webpanel), the device will send a temperature and humidity report once every 2 hours. Home Assistant marks the device as unavailable if it doesn’t receive a report from the device for more than 2 hours.
If the device is powered by USB, the update frequency is 10 or 15 minutes, I don’t remember correctly.

4

Thanks for helping on this.

The USB frequency is 5 minutes. I’m attempting to set up a ping to the IP addresses using a custom 5 second frequency, but I’m still occasionally missing the short windows when they’re on-line.

I think I’m going to need a different device. It would be great if there was a, “last updated” entity to be able to use to determine when they last checked in, like there are with other devices, but that’s likely going to be an unreasonable thing for me to ask.

5

Even pinging every 5 seconds isn’t enough to catch them all reliably. I’d have to ping every couple of seconds to stand a chance of catching them all.

Looks like I’m going to need another device. Oh well. Such is life!

6

Argh. It appears that there is a “last updated” … now if only I can get a hold of that for automations.

7

Apparently it isn’t an attribute, so I don’t know where the entity card is getting that secondary value from. Drat. I’ll keep digging

8

I’ve a heap of these and they work great:

I only use the Shelly H&T out in the shed and the likes where Zigbee doesn’t quite reach.

9

Thanks. The questions I have are, how often does it report and does it take USB power rather than battery please… or how long do the batteries last?

10

Every 5 minutes. I’ve had these for about 3 months and the battery is still reporting 100%. It’s a fairly beefy CR2450 cell in there.

11

Thanks.

I’m going to put some effort behind trying to get that last update value which I know is there, because entity card lists it as a secondary value, but it’s just not on the sensor itself.

If I can’t achieve that, then I’m going to have to replace the Shelly units with those Sonoffs.

12

Turns out it’s this…
{{ relative_time(states.sensor.lounge_temperature.last_reported) }}