INSTEON Water Leak Sensor

Posted on
Thu Apr 18, 2019 6:42 am
welchgregusa offline
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Re: INSTEON Water Leak Sensor

@Matt et al.: re. my leak sensor issue, I have since removed a lot of triggers for things I decided I did not need, and since then it seems that I have had few—I think 0—heartbeat timer timeouts. So it's as if the heartbeats were getting lost/missed/dropped. This is on a 2018 Mac Mini w/ 32GB of RAM running only Indigo, Simon, TeamViewer Host, and a DDNS client.

@Midnightson: I believe you should be able to "turn off" a leak sensor after it "fires"—I do all the time—except that the contacts must be dry otherwise it simply fires again. It sound like you might have a communication issue. The leak sensors can only use RF. I have added some Insteon Range Extenders (https://www.insteon.com/range-extender) in strategic places around my house, and that seemed to help with missed transmissions. Re. the battery, you could set up a "heartbeat" timer and triggers for each leak sensor, or install the Cynical Behaviors plugin (http://www.cynic.org/indigo/plugins/online/behaviors.html) which appears to provide heartbeat capability "out of the box" for leak sensors. BTW—glad to hear about the valve—I'm about to install the same on my house.

Posted on
Thu Apr 18, 2019 7:02 am
Midnightsun offline
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Joined: May 21, 2011

Re: INSTEON Water Leak Sensor

Read that the initial sensors could be turned off remotely but insteon redesigned them to reset only by pushing the button physically on them, I believe if you have the new sensors like I do it is not a communications issue. Sensors were definitely dry when I tried to reset via indigo. Actually had me stumped because they kept going off (all five of them) and ended up with over 50 emails until I figured it out.

Posted on
Thu Apr 18, 2019 4:53 pm
Midnightsun offline
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Re: INSTEON Water Leak Sensor

Got another 4:52 leak sensor detection with the new 7.3 indigo version so that did not fix it. Will try removing the battery from the leak sensor to see if it still occurs. This should tell me if it is Indigo or the sensor which is at fault. Will post back tomorrow with the results.

EDIT
Even with the battery removed I am getting an event happening in Indigo, definitely not the sensor which is at fault. Not sure where to look. Any help would be appreciated.

Posted on
Thu Jun 13, 2019 7:51 am
armeyer10 offline
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Joined: Apr 26, 2018
Location: Cambridge

Heartbeats not detected from INSTEON Water Leak Sensor

indigo stopped receiving heartbeats last week from all five of my leak detectors. Heartbeat signals don't appear in indigo log.
Batteries in detectors are OK. Wet and dry signals work OK. Forcing heartbeats from trigger actions works OK.
Trigger actions worked OK for years until last week.
Grateful for advice about this.
I'm running indigo 7.3 on a 2012 mac-mini with OSX 10.14.5

Posted on
Thu Jun 13, 2019 9:18 am
jay (support) offline
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Re: Heartbeats not detected from INSTEON Water Leak Sensor

armeyer10 wrote:
indigo stopped receiving heartbeats last week from all five of my leak detectors. Heartbeat signals don't appear in indigo log.
Batteries in detectors are OK. Wet and dry signals work OK. Forcing heartbeats from trigger actions works OK.
Trigger actions worked OK for years until last week.


This is usually because of powerline signal noise. Unsolicited broadcasts like that are very susceptible to signal noise and are often an early warning sign of potential issues. I'd start by checking the signal troubleshooting page to see if I could identify any source of potential signal noise. While that article focuses on the power line, it may be that the detector signal has to jump from RF over to the power line to make it to your PowerLinc.

Another thought would be to move one of them close to your PowerLinc and see if that one starts generating the heartbeat again. If so, then it's very likely a signal issue. If not, then it may be some other kind of linking issue or even an issue with the PowerLinc.

And one more thing I'd do: leave one of them in it's current location, and resync it (which would fix any broken links in the device or in the PowerLinc) and see if that makes any difference.

Jay (Indigo Support)
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Posted on
Fri Jun 21, 2019 9:59 am
armeyer10 offline
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Joined: Apr 26, 2018
Location: Cambridge

Re: INSTEON Water Leak Sensor

Still no heartbeats from any of my 5 leak sensors. Tried resyncing, resetting, and reinstalling to test one sensor; still works fine except for heartbeat. Could all the heartbeats be suppressed by signal noise yet wet & dry work fine?

I did notice a couple of other forum posts in April about blanket heartbeat failures.

Grateful for further thoughts about fixing this.

thanks, a

Albert R. Meyer
Newton Center, MA

Posted on
Sun Jun 23, 2019 3:36 pm
matt (support) offline
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Re: INSTEON Water Leak Sensor

Hi Albert,

Did you see this post on another thread? Looks like he got it working via a factory reset then re-syncing it Indigo. Above it sounds like you've done both of those, but maybe not in that order?

Image

Posted on
Sun May 30, 2021 10:01 am
Professor Falken offline
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Re: INSTEON Water Leak Sensor

Has anyone solved (or experienced) the problem of some Insteon leak sensors dropping off the network for their heartbeats. I actually have posted on this issue before several years ago: https://forums.indigodomo.com/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=19496&p=149988#p149988.

I think it might happen when a heartbeat is missed during a time when Indigo isn't fully engaged (eg, a power outage happens, the mac doesn't automatically restart, and a heartbeast or two are sent but not seen by Indigo becsue it is offline). Afterwards, the heartbeats from just these sensors won't register in Indigo.

Curiously, the sensors still will function and report a leak, and appropriate Indigo triggers will fire, but the heartbeats will not resume in Indigo until they are re-synced. Without a heartbeat, there is no way to know if the battery is dead, etc., so I end up having to resync them for safety.

I think it might be a bad batch or firmware issue or something, because it's only about 4 of the 20 I have, and always the same ones. They are scattered throughout my house, at varying distances from Insteon repeaters (and one is almost on top of another RF repeater device). Unfortunately, 2 of them are ones that are hard to reach when I need to resync. I need to just switch them out with easier to access ones, but fixing all the links can be a bit of a pain (I'm a heavy user of control pages).

Just wondering if anyone in the community had found a solution to this annoyance with an otherwise good product.

Posted on
Mon May 31, 2021 10:13 am
Professor Falken offline
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Re: INSTEON Water Leak Sensor

All of the ones that have to be re-synced after an Indigo restart have a sticker on them that says REV2.6, whereas all the ones that work correctly (keep registering a heartbeat after an Indigo restart) say REV2.3. I assume this is some kind of firmware designation or something. Is it possible Indigo treats these differently?

Posted on
Mon May 31, 2021 7:28 pm
matt (support) offline
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Re: INSTEON Water Leak Sensor

Indigo doesn't have any conditional logic for firmware versions of the leak sensors. If it starts working after a sync then the problem might be the module is forgetting some of the Insteon links Indigo adds to it. The sync Event Log details would likely show this – Indigo adding a link. If Indigo does a sync and no links are added then it will just show that it found the links it expected. So take a look at the Event Log after it stops working and you perform a sync to get it working again. Ccopy/paste it into a reply and we can take a look at it.

Image

Posted on
Tue Jun 01, 2021 5:13 pm
Professor Falken offline
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Re: INSTEON Water Leak Sensor

OK, will do. Thanks.

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