Every once in a while with no pattern or logic, I get prompted by my Alexa nodes to log on to homeassistant.local:3456. It’s usually just an annoyance. Until this morning. Overnight Amazon decided to require a cookie update. And my basement sump pump failed. I have a water sensor that would have alerted me over Alexa, except for this damned Amazon cookie.
The nodes are from this GitHub.
Has anyone upgraded to Applestruedel, or is there a better solution?
My alarm sensors trigger a notification service call to our mobile devices (HA companion app) using a priority Alarm channel that can break through any “do not disturb” settings.
The water sensor (and other alarm sensors) also has its own audible alarm but I doubt I would hear it when I’m asleep - hopefully someone else would hear it.
If you use android, you can set a timer that goes off right away. You won’t sleep through that.
The notification automations for my sump pumps use the notify service to an SMTP platform. One goes out as a regular e-mail, the other as an SMS message to my cell phone. Most cellular carriers offer a way to send an e-mail to a special address which is then sent as a text message. No need to involve Amazon or any app.
Amazon made you use them for critical systems like turning on a sump pump and alerting you to problems? Only alexa sent a notification about the water sensor? You know HA does this too, right? The whole reason HA became so attractive to people was it gave them the ability to control their data, to have their hime server in their home and not under the thumb of Amazon or Google. Your smart home can function without needing to connect to some server farm on the other side of Earth or even the internet. You put critical systems under the control of one of the least trustworthy companies with the largest possibility of a failure and you come here and blame Amazon.
That sucks your basement flooded but let this this be a lesson to you and everyone else. When you use HA who focuses on users having full control of their smart home and then you eagerly give up your ownership while adding risk of failure, thats not Amazons fault. Amazon did exactly what youd expect. Its a bloated overly complicated disappointment waiting to happen at the worst possible time.
Let alexa announce when your washing machine finishes and things like that. When it fails, no harm no foul and no basement flooding.
You completely misunderstand my complaint. My sump pump is autonomous and next to the sump there is a water sensor. When triggered, Node Red will send a TTS message to all of my Alexa devices. My complaint is about the random Amazon Cookies that have to be renewed. Sometimes daily, sometimes every five days- completely random.
That’s all. Otherwise I am quite pleased with the ease of sending TTS messages to my Alexa devices using just two Node Red nodes.
Thanks. I haven’t looked into what the companion app can do for me, but since Life360 is no longer viable, I need to do more research.
This. I have a dedicated script for end-of-the-world alarms in the form of text and TTS notifications that bypass DND and volume off (Android), and set a timer with the loudest, most eardrum-pinching tone. Using parallel actions for the notifications is also a good idea to prevent one action failing and stopping the rest.
I use pushover, and make sure critical alerts are set as such. It also bypasses mute/DnD settings.
Thanks for the tip. What or where is “pushover”? I am still drying out stuff from the basement, and discovering even more water damage, but when finished I plan to add more layers of notification.
Hopefully everyone realizes that using Amazon Echo devices in this manner is essentially via an unofficial, reverse-engineered API. This is similar to what has happened recently with Life360 and MyQ, where these unofficial APIs were shut down by their vendors. I am not claiming that Amazon is doing anything nefarious to block this use…however, they are well within their rights to make significant back-end changes which may break integrations like this.
For anything critical, always use a 100% local solution. When I was young, my father hooked up a very loud alarm to our backup sump pump, so that if the backup pump ever ran, the whole house would know about it. No smart home needed! Yes, this was installed after the basement flooded when we only had a single sump pump. 
It is a $5 one time fee, but was well worth it to me.
There is a node-red node for it as well, so is very easy to push notifications to it and send to one or more devices.
I hadn’t heard of Pushover either. Thanks! Looks very useful.
Thanks. Still cleaning up the basement, but I certainly want to look further into this. It sounds a lot like NotifyMe.
How do you send the notification from Home Assistant? Restful command?
I primarily send notifications from node-red (not HA) to pushover, however if you prefer to do it from HA there is a pushover integration you can install/use there, too.
Pushover - Looks like the solution I need. I can’t get an audible alert if the app is not open. Any tips?
@stevemann it looks like you’re trading one cloud dependency for another.
It seems as though you’ve got a situation that requires urgent attention if something goes wrong.
With the companion app, if you’re subscribed to Nabu Casa, you can get it to send notifications to your phone anywhere. Even if not, it’s possible to configure the companion app to maintain a persistent connection to your HA instance while you’re on your home LAN so the notifications are delivered over your local network with no cloud dependency.
You can use the notification channels feature to set it as ‘high importance’ and on your phone itself give it an appropriately un-ignorable tone, plus vibration.
You can directly assign a sound for iOS companion app: Sounds | Home Assistant Companion Docs
Weather or not you use this other service, it’d be absolutely worthwhile to have HA directly notify your device(s) via the companion app as a failsafe.
A couple more useful links:
Thanks for the links. I did subscribe to Nabu Casa a few weeks ago when DuckDNS was becoming unreliable. Remote access through Nabu Casa is alone worth the cost of the subscription.
But, I will admit that I hadn’t looked at the documentation of what I can do with the subscription. Since Life360 became hostile to the users, I am reading about device tracking.