Smart Home Archives - Marc's Musings

Sengled Window & Door Sensor Review

I picked these up for a decent price from Amazon. Most of my contact sensors are Z-Wave so this was my first foray into Zigbee sensors.

I was a bit uncertain about them after reading so many reviews that said the devices would report in for a while and then kind of stop.

As of this writing I’ve had these Sengled Smart Door sensors installed for just under 2 months and I couldn’t be more pleased.

Setting them up was simple, I took to heart the warnings that the battery protector tab might leave behind some residue which caused issues for some other reviewers, and just popped out the button batteries to remove the tab instead of just tugging on it.

I then popped the battery back in, put the case back together and then set my hub to “Zigbee Discovery” mode. After pressing the reset button with a paper-clip, each one of these sensors paired immediately.

Mounted on TOP of the door just under the slide

I have 2 of these installed on lesser-used hall closet doors (maybe used once a day), one on a much more used wife-primary closet door (half dozen times a day) and a final one installed on one of my most-used doors which leads to my garage / workshop (maybe 20-30 times a day). This replaced a previous sensor that was acting up. I just attached the Sengled and it worked fine. I didn’t immediately remove the old sensor bracket while I was evaluating the Sengled as you can see in the image, but I’ll clean that up next month.

Sengled Sensor on door to garage — Kinda messy temporary installation replacing an older sensor.

None of these have ever failed to report their status IMMEDIATELY and consistently. They are all used to primarily activate lights – 3 of them activate Philips Hue bulbs, and the garage one activates a GE Enbrighten paddle switch, all via Hubitat’s Rule Machine logic.

Even without being on sale (Currently $70 for 4 sensors), these are among the least expensive Door/Window sensors I’ve found. When I bought them in December they had a 40% off sale which made them THE most cost-effective sensors I’ve purchased. Combine that with their great reliability (so far…) and these are really a great deal.

You definitely HAVE to use a hub with these. I’m using them with a Hubitat Elevation, but I know that SmartThings’ hub also works with Zigbee. So that should cover a pretty substantial portion of the hub user’s demographic out there.

I will be buying more of these both for new projects and to backfill some less reliable older sensors on my property.

Wemo Smart Plug – Not there yet

I have a love/hate relationship with Belkin’s Wemo products. When they work they work very well but when they decide to misbehave, they are miserable to get working again.

I already have 9 Wemo switches in my smart home. These took a long time to settle down but back when I first got them they were at the “bleeding edge” so, like everything else at the time, things were expected to be somewhat rough around the edges.
I credit creating DNS reservations on my router for most of their current stability and improvements in device driver code for much of the rest.

When I added the first of these new smart plugs to the Wemo app it seemed to work perfectly. So I went ahead and added the other two and had them distributed throughout the house.
By the next morning I found the first one was no longer responding (just flashing orange LED) and it had to be reset – after that it worked perfectly, it even integrated with IFTTT just fine.

The other two were not so good, they just kept losing connectivity, regardless of where I located them in the house.

A real deal killer for me, and something I had not initially considered was that these were not recognized by SmartThings (which is not a problem for the Wemo Smart Switches). Likewise, Hubitat Elevation – which was going to be my primary hub for these new plugs – only has a user supported device driver for Wemo switches, dimmers, etc. and these new ones apparently do something funky (respond unexpectedly or on random ports, who knows) such that they cannot be identified for use as a device with this hub.

The real kicker is that, in introducing these to the Wemo app, it started doing all sorts of interesting things both with these plugs and my existing stable of switches. Random switches / plugs would show up as disconnected at different times. Never less than two and typically no more than four even though the switches were still working just fine with my existing hubs.

So I have returned these and am going to instead use Ikea’s Tradfri Wireless Control Outlets. I have 5 of these controlling various lighting fixtures in my house already and do you know what has never given me any problems? These Tradfri outlets! They are somewhat more limited in that they do not have an on/off switch on the unit to override them if things go awry or if you just feel like manually turning something on or off. But I’ve ordered a bunch more and am unlikely to look back at the Wemos for a long long time.

Even now, days after removing these Smart Plugs from my Wemo app, one of my Smart Switches still shows as disconnected, even tough my SmartThings hub can still control it just fine.

tldr; don’t use with SmartThings or Hubitat Elevation and beware the Wemo app. If you do get these working, don’t ever, ever change your setup…

SmartThings Hub V2 and WEMO

Last month there was a pretty major update to my SmartThings Hub and, once it was done, I found that none of my WEMO switches worked with that ecosystem any more. The things still showed up in SmartThings “stuck” in the last state that it had known them to be in prior to the update. But the state would not update as the switches were cycled, nor could I control them via SmartThings any longer.

The WEMO app continued to control the switches just fine so I knew it was unlikely to be an issue with the switches.

I conferred with SmartThings’ support folks and they pointed out that WEMO integration is a SmartThings Labs initiative. Which basically means it’s not a collaboration between Belkin and SmartThings and that Belkin can change things at any time and mess things up.

The long and short of it is that I needed to remove each WEMO switch from SmartThings, then let it discover them anew and then update every routine, SmartApp and webCoRE piston that used them as well.

This was driven home a couple of weeks later when I had to shut down my SmartThings Hub for several hours and again found the WEMO devices to be unresponsive.

The same technique worked to resolve the issue this time as well.

I’m still not 100% clear on exactly what it takes to cause the issue. Whether it’s the amount of time the SmartThings Hub is offline or if there is a confluence of events that has to happen. But I thought I’d post this to help folks who might be experiencing the same “zombie” Belkin WEMO switches in their SmartThings ecosystem.

You just need to suck it up and re-do. It’s a bit painful but you’ll resolve the issue and get on with life that much faster if you just go for it.