Low Battery and Battery Level

[MarkHargrove]

I have a pretty fair number of battery-powered Insteon devices in my home, including motion sensors, magnetic-reed closure sensors and "hidden" door sensors. All of them work as expected from a functional perspective -- but I cannot for the life of me see how I can detect that I need to change the batteries on them soon. In particular, the 'Low Battery' warning devices have never seemed to work.

Is there some magic to this?

-M.

[mnsandler]

I have a pretty fair number of battery-powered Insteon devices in my home, including motion sensors, magnetic-reed closure sensors and "hidden" door sensors. All of them work as expected from a functional perspective -- but I cannot for the life of me see how I can detect that I need to change the batteries on them soon. In particular, the 'Low Battery' warning devices have never seemed to work.

Is there some magic to this?

-M.

Make sure the devices that have a low battery device have a link in the device to hs and an associated link in the plm. But in general these notifications aren't reliable.

for the devices the report battery voltage level setup a trigger to notify when the level falls below a given level.

otherwise just document when you replace the batteries and then expect to replace them after you have some data on how long they last.

[MarkHargrove]

Thanks Mark. My devices are all set up correctly in HS3 and in my Insteon Hub. I've been fussing with this issue on-and-off for years and suspected that there was an Insteon reliability issue with this. Besides rarely seeing a state change on the 'Low Battery' device, I often don't see any change on the 'Battery Level' (especially the 1.5v devices) at all -- they stay at '1.5v' at all times, including when the battery is dead.

I think you're right that keeping a log of when I change batteries in the best idea.

-M.

[claude]

Yep, pretty unreliable. My approach is to send myself a text msg when I haven't received a heartbeat for 48 hours.

[MarkHargrove]

What is the magic incantation to get HS3 devices recreated for an Insteon device? I've somehow lost the 'Heartbeat' device for one of my door sensors. I tried doing a 'Program Device for Homeseer' and also 'Reprogram' device' from the Insteon Device config page. Both of these operations ran successfully but I still don't have the 'Heartbeat' (channel 2) device in HS.

-M.

[mnsandler]

What is the magic incantation to get HS3 devices recreated for an Insteon device? I've somehow lost the 'Heartbeat' device for one of my door sensors. I tried doing a 'Program Device for Homeseer' and also 'Reprogram' device' from the Insteon Device config page. Both of these operations ran successfully but I still don't have the 'Heartbeat' (channel 2) device in HS.

-M.

shutdown the plugin, add the following to the [device x] section of the insteon.ini

recreatedevice=true

restart the plugin

this should rebuild the missing hs devices for the given device

[MarkHargrove]

That was easy -- worked like a charm. Thanks!

Should I remove the config setting from the .ini file now?

-M.

[MarkHargrove]

Ah, disregard. I see it removed itself. :-)

-M.

[mnsandler]

not necessary. you will notice the value is now false.