Sonoff SNZB-03 hourly motion "detected"

Configuration Zigbee
1

I have been using this device for quite a while with ZHA, and it works great. I recently figured out the solution to an annoyance and wanted to post the info here in case it’s useful to anyone else.

The annoyance is that the the device would trigger motion detected often when there was no legitimate motion. For the longest time, I figured it was just shadows moving across the sensor or something, and I ignored it. When I finally got around to investigating it, I quickly noticed that the false triggers were exactly every hour, one hour apart.

My hypothesis is that the device is phoning home every hour to report battery status or whatever, and ZHA is somehow interpreting that as motion detected. I resolved the problem by changing the trigger in the automation that uses that device (typical “turn on a light” stuff). The previous trigger was on the device “started detecting motion”. I changed the trigger to be the device’s “motion” entity changing state to “detected”.

Seems good so far.

2

Hmm, well, I thought that cured the problem, but I’m still getting these false “motion detected” events on the hour. The difference is that they don’t come every hour … just some hours.

Perplexing.

3

Hi Bill, I have a few of those too and some work without issues whereas others were throwing false positives all the time.

You can find quite some threads here with this device not playing nice with all sorts of tricks to make them reliable - with no avail…

4

Thanks for the confirmation. I’ve been slowly looking through threads but haven’t found the magic for this problem yet. I may just switch to a different brand of sensor.

5

My first motion sensors where also these and I bought them because of their size and low price.
In the end, they are not worth it!

1 Like
6

I switched to a ThirdReality PIR, and the problem is gone.