Project summer home: Z-Wave network
The great plan was to move my pre-build zwave2mqtt gateway to summer home and just pair newly added thermostats in place.. however, not everything went as expected!
Thermostats
Before moving my four old HeatIt v1 thermostats to the summer home I decided to flash them with a new firmware version 1.92. I got this version last time I contacted HeatIt support earlier this year and decided to do the upgrade now before the transfer.
First fail: I did not test this version at home!
After electrician had installed the thermostats in place it was time to pair them with the gateway.. unfortunately the zwave inclusion ended up with ‘err’ (error) status for all the four thermostats. I was not able to pair them at all.
Second fail: I did not test zwave2mqtt with thermostats at home!
For the one new HeatIt v3 I managed to pair with gateway, but the integration with Home Assistant did not work properly. I could not see the status of climate entity in Home Assistant. After investigation it seemed that zwave2mqtt added quotes at auto discovery value in mode_state_template auto discovery MQTT topic. It basically means that Home Assistant tried to use string value of mode (0 or 1), but ZWave device informed values as number.
To fix this problem, had to manually edit home assistant discovery config and change action_template values from string “0” to integer 0. Same configuration had to be done also for the older V1 thermostats.
…and finally success
After downgrading Firmware of the V1 thermostats back to 1.80 and corrected discovery issue I finally managed to get them work as intented. Now I’m receiving z-wave devices information from summer home directly to my MQTT broker and through that to Home Assistant.
One last thing was to change original Home Assistant thermostat card that is way too large to something smaller like simple-thermostat.
Smoke Detector
For the smoke detectors I went with Fibaro FGSD-002. Small, afforable and indicates all necessary information that I need (smoke alarm, temperature and battery status). It also has some other neat features like tampering protection (indicates if cover is off).
For a test run it seemed to work as should. Quick notification to my phone through home assistant when smoke was detected and a loud alarm from the device itself. Now I only need to play some kind of an alarm from all my home speakers if smoke is detected at the summer home!
