First Alert ZCOMBO smoke/CO detector with Ring plug-in

[windracer]

I just added a First Alert ZCOMBO smoke/CO detector to my Ring system and noticed it showed up in Homeseer (without needing to do a device refresh, nice!). It shows up in the Ring app (and Homeseer via this PI) as two separate device: smoke alarm and CO alarm. But in HS there aren't any features. I know I saw mention of the listeners being used with this PI, but is there anything extra that should show up for this device?



That first device ("First Alert CO Alarm") I need to delete from HS because I started adding it to Ring and the messed up and had to remove/re-pair it. It's the second two that are "real."

I also noticed a new "Active Reminders List" feature under my base station. Maybe it was there before (but it's device number is sequentially right before I started adding the ZCOMBO). What is that for?

Thanks!

[dcorsus]

Typically a tamper alarm state, a communication state and a battery state is what I would expect to show up.
You can always take a capture and PM me the log so I can see what these devices publish.
As to the active reminder list feature, I added a few weeks back after I added support for panic buttons, fire/co alarm etc. For the ones I bought, when you silence the alarm, a reminder stays active until you clear it (as seen in the app). The PI will do the same, under that "active reminder list' it should show which devices have been silenced but not cleared.

[windracer]

I do see the typical batteryStatus, batteryLevel, signalStrength, alarm.activated, etc. in there. I've sent you the capture file.

And thanks for the reminder list description!

[dcorsus]

If you see the typical features, don't think there was anything more. The events are part of the alarm-hub states.

[windracer]

I see those features in the JSON I sent, but I don't seem them (or anything) under the new devices in Homeseer ... should they be listed under features?

[dcorsus]

I see those features in the JSON I sent, but I don't seem them (or anything) under the new devices in Homeseer ... should they be listed under features?

Nope when the detector alerts, it is the HUB which goes in state CO/Smoke/fire ... it has now more states

[windracer]

What I meant was I was seeing no features under the smoke and CO alarms (see screenshot in my first post). And I swear it looked like that a few hours ago when I posted, but now I checked and they've all appeared! Guess it was a timing/refresh thing, or maybe my generating the JSON fixed it?

[dcorsus]

I think this was a little bug , came a across the same that it needs "2 cycles" of discovery to add the features.

[MNB]

I currently have a number of NESTs that are expensive and are unfortunately google managed, I'm thinking about transitioning to First Alert Smoke Carbon Monoxide Smart Alarm 2ND GEN Z Wave PLUS, pros vs cons? it looks like I would have to employ a RING Hub (add to my HUE Hub), I was hoping to use Homeseer events but looking at the above posting there's not much to work with e.g. do I have a smoke or Carbon Monoxide event.

Do these devices talk to other same devices, so if there's smoke in one room the other rooms devices report/alarm of an incident?

[windracer]

it looks like I would have to employ a RING Hub (add to my HUE Hub), I was hoping to use Homeseer events but looking at the above posting there's not much to work with e.g. do I have a smoke or Carbon Monoxide event.

The ZCOMBOs are standard Z-Wave devices ... you don't need a Ring Alarm hub if you don't already have one (since I do, I linked them to the alarm system which means I also have central monitoring if there's a fire/CO event). If your Hue hub supports Z-Wave you should be able to pair the ZCOMBO with that device and then get them into Homeseer. I'd be curious if not going through Ring would expose more features instead of the basics I show above.

Do these devices talk to other same devices, so if there's smoke in one room the other rooms devices report/alarm of an incident?

No, unfortunately they're not linked like the Nest Protects. But with HS events you could probably handle this some other way?

[jrhocker]

We experienced a carbon monoxide event with our First Alert Smoke/CO detector and the Ring Alarm system this week. Everyone is fine. However, the alarm event itself was very confusing for us and made me realize I need to be better prepared.

This event occurred after we went to bed. The CO alarm in our garage went off about an hour after I went to sleep, I was very disoriented due to being in a deep sleep. At first, I thought my wife had probably gone out in the garage and triggered the alarm. So, I tried to turn off the alarm keypad and couldn't figure out why the alarm wouldn't stop beeping. Then, the phone rang and Ring Monitoring alerted us we had a carbon monoxide event and to get out of the house. They also had the fire department on the way to our house. After investigation, the fire department thought the remote starter on our car had come on and run for 5 minutes.

My question is:

To better prepare for a potential event in the future I created two events to make an announcement throughout the house about the alarm and what type of alarm it is. I think I need to base it on the 'Alarm State' of the base station. I want a TTS message to be repeated every 2 minutes until the alarm is cleared. Listed below is what I have created. Is this the best way to do the event? The 1st event is triggered by the change in Alarm State and has a 'Wait' to wake up my amps that my Sonos Ports are connected to.



Then, the 2nd event runs until the alarm event is cleared. I think...



Is this the correct way to make this announcement? This event happened in the garage, but I don't think there is a way to announce which CO detector set off the alarm.

[MNB]

You might want to look at the First Alert Zcombo self-test notification messages thread and trigger on the actual alarm device e.g. Garage Smoke detected or basement CO detected which are instant MTC.

I have basically Four events per Alarm; Smoke Detected, CO Detected, Smoke Alarm Test, Health (Heartbeat) to ensure that the alarm device is posting a heartbeat, also have SDJ-Health plugin check each device battery.

[windracer]

You might want to look at the First Alert Zcombo self-test notification messages thread and trigger on the actual alarm device e.g. Garage Smoke detected or basement CO detected which are instant MTC.

I've been watching that thread but think that the ZCOMBOs show up differently in HS when you pair them directly to the HS hub vs. when you have them paired to the Ring hub and then are exposing them to HS through this plug-in. I don't think the Ring API is exposing as much detail as when the devices are directly paired to HomeSeer.

[MNB]

@windracer Did not know that I just assumed that once you accept the alarm device into HS that you have all of the associated children devices, but if I use Ring HUB it somehow makes only Top-Level Ring devices?? I did not want my fire and CO protection having to go from alarm to ring hub to Cloud Server back to ring hub as there are obviously latency issues and more points of potential break down. I too use my SONOs to communicate throughout the house as where and what the alarm event has happened in order that folks can vacate the house smartly...

@jrhocker I like your second event, but I think every 2 minutes needs to shorten so there's no pregnant silences, especially if the actual alarm's sound is somewhere else in the house and can not be heard by all folks

[windracer]

MNB Unless I'm missing something obvious, my ZCOMBOs in HS (through the Ring plug-in) look like this:



I don't see extra features like smoke or CO alarm events, the heartbeat, etc. like I see pictures in that other thread. And notice the communcation/link states haven't even changed since I installed them, so there's no way for me to use an event to track a hearbeat like your discussion in that other thread.

The "benefit" though, of having these paired to the Ring Alarm hub is the central monitoring (hence the fire department being dispatched to jrhocker's house when the alarm went off.