Sonoff SWV water valve

Athom · January 6, 2025, 6:14pm

install took me about 30min and it works pretty good.

the upper limit of my water-flow is only about 11 l/min (reason below) which is also measured more or less correct (~0,6 m³/h) … i just would like to have more digits. the difference between 0.1 or 0.2 m³/h is huge (for my purpose)

my use-case:
when the temperature of the main water pipe to my home is getting too cold (because the last meters are not deep enough in the ground) i just open the valve und let “warmer” water through this section to prevent it from freezing. i installed the SWV at an indoor sink (3/8" input) and therefore i dont have such high flow-rates

this is much more cost-efficient than the “normal” way of heating the pipe (and the soil …). i really like, that i can send the OFF-command together with the ON-command. So it sould turn off, even when HA crashes while the valve is open

30s of waterflow every 30min should be enough (in my case…)

Gurulee · January 30, 2025, 11:24am

SONOFF sent me a replacement SMV and the same issue persists, no data from volume flow rate entity.

I tried throttling back the output spigot in front of the SMV and left it on with water flowing for 20min, but entity does not update and no data.

Also noticing the volume flow rate entity is not updating since 4hrs ago even if I ping it toggle it on/off:

Reconfiguring the device in Zigbee and toggling it on/off succeeds, but still does not update the flow rate entity.
Bindings and reporting show good:

I am testing again from a different house hose spigot and same results with no volume flow rate readings. I even tried dialing back the house manual valve to see if it was too much water pressure, still no luck. I filled my hot tub for 30 minutes and it didn’t read any of it

Any ideas?

AurelianRQ · May 3, 2025, 6:49am

Same issue here, anyone found any solution for this ? Giex is more capable but it is so unreliable but this one seems more stable but a lot of features are missing from it, it does have the flow meter, i see once it is on but i don’t see how many litters i used for each irigation and they don’t add like a index anywhere so that is the purpose of that sensor if we cannot use it ?

AurelianRQ · May 3, 2025, 6:54am

i see the scene part in z2mqtt and unfortunately all those sliders but no values so no idea what you set there and once you start to slide one i get a lot of red error warnings like
so how is this supposed to work ? i assume that it is an unfinished part of the code here or something .

Gurulee · May 6, 2025, 10:50am

I’ve had an email conversation going back and forth with SONOFF support for the last 3 months or so, no resolution yet. They’ve even sent me a replacement SMV unit and it’s the same issue. Nothing fancy for my setup, it’s just attached to my outdoor hose spigot that comes right off the house. I’ve tried dialing back the water flow going into the valve to see if it has an impact on flow rate, but still no flow detected.

AurelianRQ · May 7, 2025, 5:22pm

well this sucks , as i had on the giex part ways to program the automation to tell it when to water, how many liters and so on. while here i cannot, and i don’t trust those that would be reliable enough and i don’t want to discover that let’s say connection dropped or so and those keep watering like crazy while i am not home and waste water . So i guess if this does not get fixed, i have 2 giex and 4 sonoff , i will have to go back to the old trusty standalone controllers which do the job once you program them. It was nice to have a status on how much water is used on each module, i could do that with Giex, i cannot do that with Sonoff , is just sad that we have a lot of “smart things” which could be useful, but in the end they end up just becoming junk and get wasted

Gurulee · May 20, 2025, 12:51pm

So after back and forth with Sonoff support, they recommended I change the device from zha Network to z2m network. I want to run both these networks in parallel, so I bought the Sonoff ZBDongle-E.

AurelianRQ · May 21, 2025, 10:58am

well i have same thing, i put the dongle, and my devices are all on z2m and today i got the surprise that even do i set the unit to turn off, and HA confirmed that the unit turned off apparently, after arriving there , after 3 hours i discovered that the water was still on and ended up flooding my crops so , unfortunately this is just waste of money and not reliable. i cannot risk. to have such a mess in my garden and waste water and all that for things that supposed to work but don’t work , sadly i will have to give up to smart things and go back to reliable standalone programmers and let them do the job.

Gurulee · May 25, 2025, 2:37pm

RESOLVED!
Everything is working now for me and issues resolved. I converted Sonoff smv valves from zha to z2m and they’re working great. I see water flow rate and everything now.
I installed the second zigbee dongle, one is for zha Network and the other is for my z2m network. Some zigbee devices just work better and offer more features on z2m than zha.

FutureTense · June 12, 2025, 12:46pm

Both Water leakand Water supply are binary_sensors.

Water leak becomes true under what circumstances?

Water supply is either Ok or Problem. Once again, what causes a “problem”? The log just says a problem is detected but not indicating what the problem is.

FutureTense · June 12, 2025, 12:50pm

Also, why is my battery always reading 0%? I just verified I have fresh batteries in there.

I bought this because my neighbors have called me several times complaining about my water going off. Sure enough the hose was leaking. The leak sensors don’t seem to be reliable, so what I was thinking of doing is look at the volume flow rate sensor. If it’s > 0 for more than 30 minutes, take some action. Is there a better way?

surgptr · June 16, 2025, 6:51pm

I managed to set up an automation using cyclic_timed_irrigation. I don’t want something to happen which could prevent the irrigation from shutting off. This could be wireless interference, power failure, HA crashing, etc.

I’m using Zigbee2MQTT for the integration. Please see my config below which waters at 11:30 AM on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for 20 minutes (1200 seconds). Replace {Friendly Name} with the friendly name of your device in Zigbee2MQTT.
Sonoff SWV firmware is on version 1.0.4

alias: Switch {Friendly Name} on
description: ""
triggers:
  - trigger: time
    at: "11:30:00"
conditions:
  - condition: time
    weekday:
      - mon
      - wed
      - fri
actions:
  - action: mqtt.publish
    metadata: {}
    data:
      topic: zigbee2mqtt/{Friendly Name}/set
      payload: >-
        {"cyclic_timed_irrigation": {"current_count": 1, "total_number": 1,
        "irrigation_duration": 1200, "irrigation_interval": 1}}
mode: single

I set:
current_count to 1 but it’s a bit pointless as this value should be read and not set IMO.
total_number to 1 to ensure the cycle only runs once. This cannot be set to 0 - the device will reject it.
irrigation_interval to 1 second since there is only one cycle (total_number=1) so the interval is irrelevant. This cannot be set to 0 - the device will reject it.
irrigation_duration is in seconds

solomonb · June 23, 2025, 12:54am

I’m new to HA and Zigbee, but I am using zigbee2mqtt and am having the random shutoff issue others mentioned. Where do you create this script? Is this in HA or zigbee2mqtt?

piers · July 11, 2025, 5:29am

Have just purchased on of these so thanks for this @surgptr.
@solomonb you create this as an automation and edit in yaml mode.

I live in the desert so i’ve set it up like this - annoyingly this wont work if you want to water less than daily as the max internal is 24 hours but my thinking is by firing this from HA every morning run this 100 times, irrigate for (in this example 6 minutes) each time and every 12 hours.
this way even if we lose power or whatever the device will still water every 12 hours for 50 days.

(dont forget to replace {Friendly Name} with the actual device name, like no one did here…)

alias: Hose Irrigation
description: “”
triggers:

trigger: time
at: “08:40:00”
conditions:
actions:
action: mqtt.publish
metadata: {}
data:
topic: zigbee2mqtt/{Friendly Name}/set
payload: >-
{“cyclic_timed_irrigation”: {“current_count”: 1, “total_number”: 100,
“irrigation_duration”: 360, “irrigation_interval”: 43200}}
mode: single

piers · July 13, 2025, 6:47am

ok, curious if anyone can shed light on this. I tweaked the above a little bit and now have it firing twice a day. Plus the option to manually trigger for 5 minutes. I was hoping it would provide persistence as described above and did while on my desk. Traces are fine however logs are weird with the mqtt sent:

Hose Irrigation Cyclic timed irrigation changed to {‘current_count’: 1, ‘irrigation_duration’: 420, ‘irrigation_interval’: 86400, ‘total_number’: 100}

but then

Hose Irrigation Cyclic timed irrigation changed to {‘current_count’: 1, ‘irrigation_duration’: 495, ‘irrigation_interval’: -1078132736, ‘total_number’: 100}

I’ve not played a lot with tweaking mqtt - I’m wondering if the retain or debounce might be useful

z2m config

(the signal is actual 130 according to maps - its 2ft from a router)

logs

–
latest firmware and everything else

automation

alias: Hose Irrigation
description: “”
triggers:

trigger: time
at: “06:00:00”
alias: morning-watering
id: morning-watering
alias: evening-watering
trigger: time
at: “21:00:00”
id: evening-watering
trigger: state
entity_id:
- input_button.irrigate_now
  id: irrigate-now
  conditions:
  actions:
choose:
- conditions:
  - condition: trigger
    id:
    - evening-watering
      sequence:
  - action: mqtt.publish
    metadata: {}
    data:
    topic: zigbee2mqtt/Hose Irrigation/set
    payload: >-
    {“cyclic_timed_irrigation”: {“current_count”: 1, “total_number”:
    100, “irrigation_duration”: 240, “irrigation_interval”: 86400}}
- conditions:
  - condition: trigger
    id:
    - morning-watering
      sequence:
  - action: mqtt.publish
    metadata: {}
    data:
    topic: zigbee2mqtt/Hose Irrigation/set
    payload: >-
    {“cyclic_timed_irrigation”: {“current_count”: 1, “total_number”:
    100, “irrigation_duration”: 420, “irrigation_interval”: 86400}}
- conditions:
  - condition: trigger
    id:
    - irrigate-now
      sequence:
  - action: mqtt.publish
    metadata: {}
    data:
    topic: zigbee2mqtt/Hose Irrigation/set
    payload: “{"state" : "ON", "on_time": 300, "off_wait_time": 10}”
    mode: single

andreas.h · July 16, 2025, 11:37am

My experience is: what you send to valve does work, even if what you read back immediately afterwards is senseless.

As long as you use timed triggers on HA side to open the valve twice a day, you won’t need additional cycles of the valve itself.
Different durations for morning and evening anyway could not be handled by the valve.
So in your payload you could set “total_number”:1 and “irrigation_interval”: 1, as long as each watering is started by HA, as you created it.

piers · July 16, 2025, 11:56am

Thanks Andreas,

Yes the watering is working, but I was hoping that the value would have a level of local redundancy - I live in the UAE, plants don’t last long in August!

Sadly I don’t think its likely to be candidate for esphome and more robust functioning unless they are using two distinct chips

brendan · July 17, 2025, 5:20am

For those that are having it turn off after 30 minutes, have you also set it up in the EWELINK app? This is actually a feature of the valve, as it is designed for irrigation, which means the outlet is always open and there should be flow always when the valve is open.
Itead / SOnOff even list this as a feature.
I set up the valve directly with ZHA and it never touched the EWELINK app and I do not have any issues with it turning off after 30 minutes. I even disabled the Water Problem sensor in Home Assistant as I use it on a washing machine, so every time the water stops it detects a water flow problem.

@piers
Given it is Zigbee it’s very much unlikely ESPhome would work. I haven’t found my one unreliable, so maybe there are multiple firmware versions? Not that I would rely on Home Assistant or any other hub to for anything mission critical. I’d buy a proper watering control system if I wanted to 100% keep plants alive. This type of valve is more just for the “ooops, I forgot to turn the tap off” situations.

Edit: I just found using ZHAToolKit you can change the timeout cluster setting to make it a longer period. By default it seems to be set to 900 seconds ( which in theory is 15 minutes, but sonoff seems to double that time)
If it is helpul, Cluster 6 is what you want. I changed mine from the default to 7200.

zha_toolkit_version: v1.1.27
zigpy_version: 0.80.1
zigpy_rf_version: 0.45.2
ieee_org: switch.washer_valve
ieee: 8c:65:a3:ff:fe:ef:24:57
command: conf_report
command_data: null
start_time: "2025-07-17T07:21:42.503725+00:00"
errors: []
params:
  cluster_id: 6
  attr_id: 0
  min_interval: 0
  max_interval: 7200
  reportable_change: 0
  dir: 0
  tries: 1
  expect_reply: true
  args: []
  kwargs: {}
  read_before_write: true
  read_after_write: true
success: true
result_conf:
  - - status: 0
      direction: null
      attrid: null

brendan · July 17, 2025, 5:35am

Water problem = no water flow detected through valve
Leak = very small / trickle type flow through valve.

Personally I don’t use either because of the use case, and prefer to use proper leak sensors to detect water leaks.

Apron3130 · August 2, 2025, 11:33pm

Thanks to @surgptr and @solomonb and many others that have contributed to this post. Several of the automation templates were what I needed to get started on something simple that I have wanted for a while - cyclic irrigation that can be started from a button on a dash. Previously I would use cyclic irrigation but that would require loading the zigbee2mqtt website and I’d have to be at home (since the website is local). My Home assistant app on my phone can access the server remotely.

My use case is simply that I wanted to water something for a certain amount of time and the valve will turn off on its own, even if HA fails or poor zigbee connection. I prefer to trigger it manually rather than on a schedule.

To do this - create an Input button, which is a “helper.” I’m calling this the Garden Hose Timed Watering

Set this as the trigger to send the MQTT command (as described above).

alias: Garden Hose Timed Watering Button Automation
description: “”
triggers:

trigger: state
entity_id:
- input_button.garden_hose_timed_watering
  conditions:
  actions:
action: mqtt.publish
metadata: {}
data:
topic: zigbee2mqtt/Garden Hose/set
payload: >-
{“cyclic_timed_irrigation”: {“current_count”: 1, “total_number”: 1,
“irrigation_duration”: 60, “irrigation_interval”: 1}}
mode: single

Then all you would need to do is add that input button to your dashboard and your timed watering is one click away!

If anyone has ideas for improvements, let me know. Feel like this could be made into a blueprint to make things even easier.