Door Sensor - Aeotec

The Aeotec door sensor is a slim Z-Wave door and window contact that reports three states rather than two: open, closed and tilted. A tilted window is the one an ordinary magnetic contact calls closed, which is how a house ends up open all night.

• Why the Aeotec door sensor reports three states
• The spare input is the feature nobody advertises
• It tells the hub if somebody interferes with it
• Fitting and battery life
• What it needs

It is a Z-Wave device and needs a Z-Wave hub.

Why the Aeotec door sensor reports three states

Open and closed is what every magnetic contact gives you. This one adds tilted, from at least five degrees. That matters because a casement window pushed to but not latched sits in exactly the position an ordinary contact calls closed, and the house is then reported secure while a window is standing open. If you have ever armed an alarm and found a window ajar in the morning, this is the sensor that would have caught it.

The spare input is the feature nobody advertises

There is a potential free binary input on the board. A plain wired contact you already have, a micro switch, an NTC temperature probe or a flood sensor can be wired to it and brought onto the Z-Wave network through this one device. On an older house with existing alarm contacts already run through the walls, that turns a legacy installation into something your hub can read without pulling new cable. A momentary switch on the same input triggers scenes instead.

It tells the hub if somebody interferes with it

Tamper protection is built in, so detaching the sensor from the frame or prising the case open is reported rather than silently disabling it. It also runs S2 security with SmartStart, which means the pairing is encrypted and adding it is a matter of scanning the code rather than putting the hub into a learn mode and hoping.

Fitting and battery life

Adhesive. Sensor on the casement, magnet on the frame, no drilling and no wiring. Aeotec quote three years plus from the cell and a response half again as fast as the previous generation. On a window you open every day, three years is the difference between a device you forget about and one that becomes a chore.

What it needs

A Z-Wave hub, because this reports to a controller rather than to a phone. We hold three controllers that take it: the Fibaro Home Center Lite, the Fibaro Home Center 2 and the Homey Pro. Pair it with the Aeotec Siren and the hub can make a noise about it.

Aeotec publish the sensor at aeotec.com.