Category: IoT

The excitement never ends

The kitchen has been remodeled and one of the reasons the kitchen needed to be remodeled was a water leak, causing a soft spot in the floor. Because of this leak and since I am a bit of a geek on home automation, I have set up systems to monitor for any new leaks.

The heart of the system is my Hubitat Elevation hub and multiple sensors located around things that can leak. Since I have been using this for a couple years I have an older hub, I think they are on version C7 now mine is a C5 I believe.

Hubitat HubZL-LD-100_rope

I have one leak sensor on the sink, one on the dishwasher, and a third on the washing machine just off the kitchen. Another set of sensors in the crawl space by the water pump and the water heater. The plan is to add a switch to shut off the main water line and another for shutting off the water pump.Zlink

Two sensors hanging under the kitchen sink, one goes over to the dishwasher and the other monitors the drain.

The hub and the sensors are in now I need to look at the valve. I am thinking the Leak Gopher may be the way to go. So once a sensor triggers Hubitat can send a message to the valve and shut off the water line.

The last piece is a shutoff for the well pump. Aeon Labs makes an Aeotec heavy duty smart switch that can handle 40 amps or I could use a contactor and a ZWave+ plug to turn it on and off.

I am using a rather expensive Red Coral Technology box using a contactor with a WeMo switch for WiFi control to manage the hot water heater. This is about twice the cost of others that are on the market now and doesn’t seem to be available any longer. It has worked flawlessly for over two years and hasn’t caused me any problems. I think it saved the cost of purchase in about ten months. I think I picked that one because it was rated for 50 amps at 240 volts, where the Aeotec is only 40 amps. I have thought about changing out the WeMo switch with a ZWave+ switch just to standardize things a bit more, but the default setup here has worked very well.

Red Coral

Tasmota Martin Jerry Smart Switch

smart switch
smart switch installation
INSTALLATION REQUIREMENT
It fits the standard mult-gang outlet plate, and outlet box. Just replace your non-smart switch with this smart one in 10 mins.

Neutral wire is required
One-way switch (NOT 3-way)
2.4G Home WiFi network (NOT 5G)
iOS or Android phone
Basic electrical wiring experience
Basic installation tools (screwdriver, wire strippers, voltage checker)
I used these settings that I found and can’t find again from the Internet. With generic it gives me three switch options in the local page but I’m only using one here.

I also have some Martin Jerry smart plugs that I loaded Tasmota on. One problem with these is they display as OFF in the Tasmota software when they are on. I removed entries from GPI04 and GPI05 to get rid of two extra buttons that were displayed in the GUI. The button on the side of the plug works but doesn’t light up right now.

For the plugs that I had, the relay needed to be changed otherwise off was on and on was off. So D6 change 29 to 21 and it works as expected.

I’ve got a generic Tuya Smart outdoor plug that I flashed with Tasmota. It has two outlets on it so the settings are below.

I named the outlets one and two and loaded them into Hubitat with the Sonoff-Tasmota driver as two separate virtual devices as switch number 1 and switch number 2. This plug is branded Amzdest with two outlets.

I tried another outdoor plug that I have this one is three outlets and labeled as Tonbux. I couldn’t get the third outlet working but found a link with a number of similar devices and used the setup from there.

Three outlet outdoor plug
{“NAME”:”Outdoor3Outlet”,”GPIO”:[0,0,0,23,56,0,0,0,21,17,22,0,0],”FLAG”:0,”BASE”:18}

Hubitat

I decided to move my smart home devices to Hubitat from SmartThings. The hub is small about two by two inches and half an inch thick. It uses an external Z-wave/Zigbee stick. About Half the size of my SmartThings hub. I have used the SmartThings hub since December 2016.

hubitat

Yes that USB adapter sticks out the side of the hub, making it look like an afterthought. Setup was smooth and their interface works well. I think it works better than using the interface for SmartThings however there is no app that can be used to easily control devices when I’m not home. They do allow some web links back to the hub but these seem to work intermittently so far, mostly due to my connection not being stable on my phone. The idea is to automate things as much as possible and keep traffic local so its a trade off. I didn’t have to much trouble with the SmartThings hub, but I don’t see the need to have everything out in the cloud when most of this gets managed locally and has no need to leave the house.

Devices I have moved over so far include.

  • Yale YRL220 lever locks. Removing from SmartThings was a little troublesome but they paired right up with Hubitat and Hubitat was able to read the existing codes from the locks as well as add and delete new codes. I think the removing was just an issue with how I did the removal. I should have read the instructions before starting. October 2017
  • Sengled E11-G13W Smart LED Soft White (Element Classic) Bulb Zigbee. Removed from SmartThings and paired up with Hubitat no problems. October 2018
  • Tuya Smart devices. These devices use the Tuya Smart app and I”m still working on getting that setup in the house. It requires an external node.js server running on my Raspberry Pi. I haven’t set all of this up yet.
    • Wireless Garage Door Opener Remote WiFi Switch Universal Controlled by Smartphone. I can control up to three devices with this and it uses a proximity sensor to indicate if a door is open or closed. 2018
    • Martin Jerry mini Smart Plug 2017
  • Everspring ST812 Z-Wave Wireless Flood Detector Haven’t moved this one yet. 2018
  • Wemo Switches work over WiFi, no problems connecting them but some issues with getting them to work remotely consistently. These were my introduction to IoT devices and I have them placed where I can’t easily get to light switches. They have been very reliable with my first one installed for about three years now. December 2015
  • Samsung SmartThings Water Leak Sensor Zigbee. Battery lasts about a year and works well for leaks. I would not place it where it can be submerged. Moved over from SmartThings to Hubitat with no problems. September 2016
  • Samsung SmartThings GP-U999SJVLCAA Smart Water Leak Sensor, Zigbee. Paired up no problems and reads temperature fine. September 2018
  • Samsung SmartThings GP-U999SJVLAAA Door and Window Multipurpose Sensor, Zigbee. This has a tilt sensor in it and so far Hubitat is not reading that correctly. I want to use the tilt sensor on the garage door to let me know if the door is open or closed. September 2018
  • Sonoff Basic using Tasmota firmware no luck with these so far. These are using WiFi. 2018
  • Kankun Smart Switches WiFi, from a variety of manufacturers. These all run OpenWRT and are controlled with some json code in SmartThings. No luck with getting the groovy code from SmartThings to Hubitat yet, but I haven’t spent much time with this so far. I get an error on line 127 right now that I need to dig into. With some help from the Hubitat forums, I changed physicalgraph with hubitat in the code on line 127 and it works now. These are all the same device sold by different companies.
    • Amcrest 2015
    • JTD 2016
    • QISC  2017
  • Sensi UP500W Thermostat on WiFi. I haven’t done anything on this yet it didn’t work under SmartThings and I don’t know if I’ll even try to move this onto Hubitat. December 2016
  • Ring Doorbell Pro and Spotlight Camera Plugin. I haven’t tried anything with this yet. I am using IFTTT with the Wemo app to turn on lights when I arrive home and this works well, but it is outside of Hubitat. 2017
  • Zooz Z-Wave Plus Smart Plug ZEN06 VER. 2.0 with 2 USB Charging Ports, White. This is on order from Amazon and I’ll use it in the garage as a repeater for the Z-Wave network. Setup was easy with Hubitat, no problems. The size of this plug is a bit on the large side, but it is designed to only cover one outlet in a duplex. December 2018
  • Leviton Z-Wave VRPD3-1LW Vizia RF + Series 300 Watt Plug-In Lamp Dimming Module for CFL and LED. Worked no problems bringing it from SmartThings to Hubitat. January 2017
  • Leviton DZPA1-2BW Decora Smart Plug-in Outlet Z-Wave Plus. Worked no problems bringing it from SmartThings to Hubitat. December 2017
  • Aeotec Range Extender 6, Z-Wave Plus repeater, Aeotec Range Extender 6, Z-Wave Plus repeater It was tough to get this to link up the first time with Hubitat but it did eventually connect and is working well now. I could have just as easily used a plug with Z-Wave Plus and gotten the functionality of the of the plug for about the same price. December 2018
  • Aeon Labs Aeotec Z-Wave Gen5 Multi-Sensor (Z-Wave Plus) I had given up on this with SmartThings mostly because of battery life being useless. With Hubitat and four fresh AAA batteries it seems to be working well so far. December 2016
  • Aeotec TriSensor, Z-Wave Plus S2 Motion, Temperature, Light Sensor, 3-in 1 Paired up quickly and working well for about a week or two now. November 2018

  • Z-Wave Plus Gold Plated Reliability Garage Door Tilt Sensor, White (TILT-ZWAVE2.5-ECO). Connected up with a couple of tries removing and putting the battery back in. Contact sensor works with the gerneric z-wave contact sensor driver from Hubitat. December 2018