What is the current status of compatible smoke alarms in the US?

That is normal. It’s a battery powered device so it wakes up when it wants to and remains asleep and unresponsive the rest of the time. It doesn’t respond to polling from the controller, as it shouldn’t, so when the controller polls for updates and the alarm doesn’t respond the controller marks it as offline.

The waking up once an hour is caused by a heartbeat it sends which is linked to one of the channels. It will only report the battery once every one or two days.

All of this is to preserve battery power.

Thanks Rich! I was fooled by my battery-powered Zooz contact sensor which always shows online. After your explanation I guess there are several battery strategies in place for different devices.

hopefully someone has found something that works well with openhab. im looking for a new smoke detector but having a hard time finding one that supports zwave and hardwired interconnect with existing smoke detectors

anybody have some suggestions

All I know is the Zcombo isn’t it.

Now, you don’t necessarily need hardware interconnect with a zwave detector. You can set them up with an association group and when the one alarm triggers it will forward that to the other alarms and they will go off.

Again, I know the Zcombo doesn’t do this but it is theoretically possible that other sensors will support this.

I’m pretty sure that the Nest Protects can work along these lines.

rikoshak, I need to purchase some more smoke alarms/ co combos and the Zcombo you have has a great sale on the Costco Website. I’ve read so many mixed reviews that I’m beginning to think that these aren’t so great. I wish that if one Zcombo was triggered the rest of the Zcombos would sound an alarm at the same time, similar to an Or Gate in logic. Any +1 input into 1 gate with 6 input and 6 outputs would create all logic Highs. I’m trying to understand your statement above. When you refer to an association group are you talking about z-wave sensors or some other type of WiFi Sensor. I read somewhere that Fibaro works that way, but they don’t include CO detectors.

I was thinking of running a new circuit from the circuit breaker and hardwiring a series of alarms through the house, but haven’t figured out how to connect it with OH yet. I would probably need a controller that polls directly with Openhab or I would have to have each one independently poll with openhab and when one detector is triggered it will send the alarm message to each connected smoke detector and trigger their individual alarms to sound. Have you heard of anybody doing this type of set-up with openhab?
I could just keep the existing smoke detectors I have, but having it connect to Openhab for notifications to my phone seems priceless, especially since I can be alerted to what zone of the house is triggering the alarm and then if I have a security camera in the vicinity of the zone I can possibly get a live video feed of that zone and get a real-time live visual of what is currently happening at my house. I’ve always been afraid of what could happen at my house when I’m gone, especially since I work over an hour a way and it’s impossible for me to get to my house quickly. I work in Los Angeles and my house is in Orange County. Geography does not really provide piece of mind.

If you don’t mind running wires, wired smoke alarms like security systems use should be pretty simple to wire in to an input pin. (If you’re on an RPi, one of the GPIO pins. Otherwise, the carrier detect pin on a serial port should work, and be easily detected from the computer.)

IIRC they just break the circuit on an alert so you know that something on that chain is alerting. They’ll need voltage (12v, I think, it’ll be easy to look up) and a pair for the circuit. Four wires; regular alarm wiring should work. Phone cables might not be big enough to carry enough current for the alarms.

Something like this: https://www.alarmsystemstore.com/products/system-sensor-i4-series-4-wire-smoke-co-detector

Note that ones that are just smoke detectors are only about $30; the CO2 sensors are apparently expensive.

When the time comes to replace the ones that came with my house, I’m going to get wireless ones that integrate to our Honeywell alarm system; it will then handle all the monitoring and alerting, and OpenHAB can get status from it via the AlarmDecoder. That’s not a perfect solution for everyone, because you might not have the alarm system and/or integration to OH for it.

They do not support this and there is no way to do this through OH integration. They are stand alone and all they do is report their battery and alarm (but not which alarm) to OH. That’s it.

Zwave services s way for devices to communicate directly with each other, called association groups. For example you can have a switch turn on and off a group of lights directly if they are all members of the same association group.

With smoke alarms, one would go off and inform the others it is going off by joining to the same association group. The Zcombos do not support application groups.

if you really want something like this why not just get some zwave sirens and have OH sound the sirens when one of the detectors goes off? The sound doesn’t have to come from the detectors themselves. You can do other stuff too. I flash all the lights in the house.

That’s a relatively simple option.

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Just on a side note: I use the Mijia-Honeywell smoke detectors throughout the house. They are connected to the Xiaomi Bridge v2 which is in turn connected to openHAB.

openHAB sees not only the alarm channel (switch) and battery channel but also tell you the density of the smoke detected (in PPM on another channel). Although they aren’t hardwired and do not support CO2 and cannot be triggered remotely from another device.

I work around this by triggering notifications, sounding an alarm on the bridge and turning on the lights.

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