Thanks Petro. Yeah I saw that picture but wasn’t sure what the yellow wire was based on it since it was a front view. I do have for this particular location a set of neutrals. Electrician put it in apparently when he put in my recessed can lights. Not sure how well a Z-Wave Plus device will work here with the metal box, but how would I wire up with this unit that happens to be on black friday sale right now:
With two traveler / load wires? Is this normal? Would think you would join those two together and then have another wire from those to the one screw as assuming having these two wires under the screw together isn’t the right way to do things?
Yep, that’s exactly what I have. Even the wires that go from the thermostat to the basement route thru conduit which our HVAC person was shocked about.
I almost said that whoever had that done (unless it was ridiculously required by local codes) paid way too much for that to be done. I don’t see any benefit at all. Not even the NEC requires it unless the Romex is running exposed on the outside of a wall.
The only thing that would come close to making me jealous for something like that is if there was a large (3" or so) open ended trunk line going between the attic and the basement. Now that would come in handy!
Based on a recent experience, I’m glad my local electrical code allows me to fish wires through walls without requiring the use of conduit.
I recently installed a new heater requiring ~ 100 feet of 12/2. I chose to sheath a significant portion of it in conduit (3/4" inside dia). The first 90-degree (curved) bend introduced a surprising amount of friction. The second one made the fishing process almost impossible. I was eventually successful but it was a helluva lesson. I had chosen to use a conduit in case I ever wanted to fish another wire through it. Yeah, that’s not going to happen.
tl;dr
Just one bend in the conduit’s run is enough to make the task challenging. Two bends will exercise your colorful vocabulary.
In my industrial experiences fishing wiring thru conduit the use of a “fish tape” is highly recommended. The rule there is no more than three 90 degree bends (270 degrees total) without a pull box. Even then it can be challenging at times.
But yeah, I can see using conduit thru walls as a big headache and expense with no significant benefit.
FWIW, I use a coil of 1/8" wide spring-steel for fishing electrical wires (I think it was left behind by the previous home owner). I believe this is the functional equivalent of ‘fish tape’ but I may be wrong. It readily snakes through things but pulling the attached 12/2 through bends was a bear. I almost used cable cream but it’s messy. In addition, working alone made the task all the more time-consuming (pulling at one end, going back to check the other end to ensure there are no kinks, returning to haul some more through, rinse, repeat). Glad that’s over and done.
Hey, you need to be jealous. I didn’t even pay for this. When we had the house built in 1972 that’s just what they did. Or at least my families builder did. I ended up taking over the house. I indirectly have a direct line from the attic to the basement but had that run when I gutted the whole house and remodeled.
OK just got some boxes from Amazon. Long active USB cable, some wall switches, wall plugs with Z-Wave, water sensors. And other things. First thing I’m going to do is power down my HA instance, plug the extension cable to my computer and the other end to my Z-Stick and run it as close to the first floor as possible. Once I move it, what do I need to do? Just heal the network or nothing at this point as it’s my only device?
Since it’s the only device, nothing needs to be done. You’d only need to heal if you had other nodes so they could potentially end up with a shorter route to the stick (hub).
So I got my Z-Stick extended further in the room, no big deal. Haven’t done anything yet that would use that distance change. I setup the fibaro flood sensor with a wired connection using a wall adapter and also added sensors to the secondary internal connectors to allow a second set or assumed second set of cables to detect wire in my sump pump.
Well here’s what I got.
Node is called FIBARO System Unknown: type=0b01, id=2003
Of course the System Unknown didn’t tell me that I was starting out good.
See all kinds of entities in this node. So that’s something:
However when I click on Node Configuration Options, there is nothing in the pulldown.
Also when I use the external probes I get a response in HA but I can sit there all day running water around the main unit and it never goes off. So apparently extending the wires disables the main unit though in another thread the thought was that wasn’t the case. Any thoughts on next steps?
Also the thing is staying awake due to my custom plug I did.
Should also be noted that sensor.fibaro_system_unknown_type_0b01_id_2003_flood triggers from 0 to 2 when the external probe is wet but the flood_2 sits at zero.
Also because this is browser based, you may need to refresh the page if you had config options already open for another node. I find that leaving the configuration and coming back gets things to ‘reset’ after adding a node.
I’ll try that again but as there was no alarm sound other than when I pick the unit up which triggered a burgular alert, and when I put the external probe in the water, chances are it probably didn’t do anything. Assuming anyway that if the main unit gets flooded with water it would alarm also.
Side question, any way that you know of to see if I can update the firmware on this unit to make sure that’s not an issue? Keep seeing people talk about firmware 3.2 and mine is on 3.03
Oh man this is really frustrating. So now when I pick up the device the alarm goes off but nothing happens in HA. The binary sensor is always off no matter what. Also when I get the unit wet the led flickers but no alarms happen or changes in HA. When I put the probe in the water the alarm goes off but again now nothing changes in HA. I know the alarm type is always set to 5 now and changed to 3 at some point for the burglar alarm. Now just sits at 5 all the time.
In my experience, if a device shows up with a description of unknown, then it is probably missing some of the parameters in the zwcfg file. This would also explain missing drop down options in the zwave config panels of HA.
If you get an updated xml file, you can stop HA, backup the zwcfg file, and then very carefully edit the entry for that file to add the missing options and information. At least that used to work on earlier versions. I havn’t had to do that in the last couple of years.
It’s about 10 feet away from the Z-Stick in the same room.
By the way with changing off the tamper alarm, I could probably do that if it wasn’t dead but probably easier to do if I could do it thru the GUI rather than morse code on the device itself.
I didn’t even pay for this. When we had the house built in 1972 that’s just what they did. Or at least my families builder did. I ended up taking over the house. I indirectly have a direct line from the attic to the basement but had that run when I gutted the whole house and remodeled.
