Leak sensor prevented me from some pain!
Leak sensor prevented me from some pain!
Had a leak under the sink in our kitchen. I don’t want to imagine what this would have meant on a larger scale, compared the 20€ I spent on the sensor and the 10mins it costed me to install it.
what model sensors are these? are they Z-wave? how long does the battery last?
I'm very interested in a similar setup.
Looks like an Aqara leak sensor. Zigbee - you generally won't find Z-wave devices for this cheap. They were around US$15 on Amazon when I last bought some in 2023, and a dollar or two cheaper on Aliexpress.
Pretty basic construction. There's two exposed terminals at the bottom, and when they connect electrically, it alerts. If you're clever, they can be used for a bunch of things, not just leak sensing (eg https://www.homeautomationguy.io/blog/making-my-own-bed-sensor).
I use the water sensors from Aqara and integrated them with a Sonoff zigbee USB stick.
I have the ikea ones (using zigbee), the two aaa batteries in there last about 1/2-1 year.
While not the same as the pictured ones, I can really reccomend them.
Was going to suggest the IKEA one. Pretty decent to use and has a local speaker if you don't have any home assistant devices near by.
The door contacts are good too but I found that I had to connect them a few times before they would register on ZHA
A few years ago the hose on our washing machine split and we didn’t realise until water started coming out from under the units. Thankfully damage was minimal but it was a big pain to dry out.
I’ve had some of those Aqara leak sensors in place since as a precaution.
Just remember to change the batteries regularly! Easy to forget them when they are out of sight.
Re batteries: You could also set up an automation that periodically checks the status and/or availability of your battery-powered sensors. Here's a useful community blueprint for this: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/low-battery-notifications-actions/653754
I have mine checked once a week.
It sucks when you have a leak sensor, estimate the likeliest place that water will appear, miss it by a few inches thanks to the way water goes where it wants, and you end up having to manually catch the leak.
Thanks for the reminder, I need to install the rest of mine and my shutoff valve and start testing the automations