I had some devices dropping off my zigbee network after a few days or weeks and never coming back. I was using ZHA on a a Nortek USB coordinator inside the network cabinet.
So I just migrated everything Zigbee2Mqtt, and simultaneously migrated to a Sonoff 3.0 coordinator dongle on a USB extension cord, with the antenna positioned outside the network cabinet. I’m told that this combination will offer a more stable network, along with more detailed information about each device.
After migration, most of my devices work just fine. However, my Aquara water leak sensors are giving me trouble. These devices are paired to the zigbee network, and I can see them and their battery level, but not the actual state of whether a leak has been detected. The “moisture” entity for all of these devices is “unknown”. This is the one piece of information that I truly need from these devices.
My house is small (1800 sqft across 2 floors). In addition to the coordinator I have 3 router/repeater devices strategically positioned. Other devices in similar areas are working as normal. Signal should not be an issue. There are only about 20 zigbee devices on the network, so overload should not be an issue either.
Any ideas here??
Zigbee2MQTT version 2.1.1 commit: unknown
Coordinator type EZSP v8
Coordinator revision 6.10.3.0 build 297
Frontend version 0.9.4
zigbee-herdsman-converters version 21.31.0
zigbee-herdsman version 3.2.5
Mosquitto version: 6.5.0
Home Assistant Core 2025.2.1
Supervisor 2025.02.0
Operating System 14.2
Frontend 20250205.0
I’d move them closer to the coordinator & putting them in some water to see if the state gets updated.
Could simply be a matter of not being patient enough to wait until their reporting interval kicks in
Dunking the sensors in water turned out to be the solution. As soon as they got wet, the state changed from “unknown” to “wet”. Kind of a peculiar way to initialize a device, probably should be documented somewhere, but thanks for the pointer! Hope these things stay connected for months or years - some of them are in hard to reach places.
An entity’s state will be unknown until the physical device reports its state.
It appears that your water leak sensor reports nothing until it experiences a state-change (dry to wet or wet to dry) otherwise it remains silent (i.e. doesn’t periodically report its current state).
FWIW, I have a water leak sensor from another brand and it behaved the same way.
Great to hear this solved the issue for your. Please mark my post as the solution so that others with a similar issue will find the answer immediately.
They would have reported their initial state within 24 hours anyway. It’s set up that way for battery devices so that there won’t be excessive battery drain. State changes get pushed immediately, but the device is only polled once a day otherwise.
They will, provided they have decent LQI to your coordinator and/or your 3 routers.
Mine will be coming up on 5 years next month, and battery is still at 62%.