Have: Sense Hub, leak sensors
Want, and got: Leak sensor report to hub if leak true, and thus Wyze App send notification to phone. Works.
Want, and got: Leak sensor continually report to hub if no leak, human can look at app to see if all OK if human wants. Works.
WANT BUT NOT GET: Sense hub alert human with app notification if a leak sensor has gone offline and cannot be reached.
(I.e., If leak sensor offline (little cloud with a line through it icon), Wyze App should ALERT notification to phone. Otherwise human goes about human business for days not knowing leak sensor is not reporting anything to hub. Leak sensor is effectively a doorstop, and if leak happens while it is offline, human will not know about leak. Human is not going to open Wyze App every hour to check if sensor is still online. But if app would alert human about offline sensor, human could investigate and figure out why sensor offline and fix.)
So I looked at the Wyze SDK for a while (Getting Started with Wyze SDK — Wyze SDK 2.1.0 documentation). I thought maybe I could python program my own thing that talks to the sense hub every hour or so, and if the sense hub says a leak sensor is offline, it could notify me. I installed the SDK on a Raspberry Pi running python 3.9.2. So far I couldn’t get the first test program to run so after some more desultory googling I decided I was not qualified.
Again: how am I the only person who wants this? I had a several day period that went by where I blithely assumed the sensors were doing their one job, only to realize they had all been offline for [UNKNOWN TIME]. The sense hub happily showed they were offline when I looked. But it never alerted me. I don’t want to have to open the app every two hours and check on it.
Before I had leak sensors, I went out of town. One day into the trip, I got a call from a neighbor. The water coming from a main floor leak shorted out the smoke alarms in the basement. The incessant beeping was the only way they even noticed something was wrong. Otherwise it would have run for 5 days instead of about 24 hours. $25,000 insurance claim. I guess Wyze leak sensors are a good idea, but I don’t feel like I can fully trust them. If I’m out of town and there is a leak while they are randomly offline, I cannot know anything is wrong. How. Am. I. The. Only. Person. Who. Sees. This. Vulnerability?
Yep. Though, as far as I could tell, last time the hub went down, I could still talk to it and see that the leak sensors were offline through the app. Which begs the question: why can’t the hub at least still send me some kind of app alert at that point about the fact that it needs attention? A bridge too far I guess.
PSA: Also get a PRV installed, and replace your fixture supply lines every 10 years or so.
Or really, the app. Why can’t the app easily see that something is unreachable? If anything is unreachable by the app, the user should clearly be alerted immediately.