Vera Plus and Fibaro FGFS-101 Flood Sensor

You’ll see elsewhere I was trying to get Aeotec Water Sensor 6s to work with Vera. At the end of the day I gave up. The Aeotecs are much too fiddly and frankly don’t work if you try to do anything with them that isn’t default. So I tried the Fibaro Flood Sensor. I have a Fibaro Motion Sensor that I use to trigger lighting at night via its lux/light sensor and it has been quite good to me.

The Fibaro Flood Sensor has quite a few more features than the Aeotec. It allows out of the box external power instead of battery power. It allows external sensor wires to be connected. It has all the Zwave configuration parameters you could want. The documentation is superior. Also, it works.

Pairing the Fibaro with the Vera was cake. Follow the wizard and it paired no sweat. However, I noticed that the Fibaro showed up in the Vera as an I/O Device instead of a Flood Sensor. Also, the icons were all weird, the Vera didn’t send notifications when water was detected, and the battery status was not being reported. Additionally, the Control4 driver was complaining with the error “device is not a security sensor” when I tried to add the device.

Apparently this is a problem because Fibaro has updated the firmware on the Flood Sensor from v3.2 to v3.3 and the Vera doesn’t know what to do with this. BUT! We have a fix.

Login to the Vera and navigate to Devices > YourDevice > Advanced. On the Params tab update with the following:

device_file: D_FloodSensor1.xml
device_type: urn:schemas-micasaverde-com:device:GenericIO:1 with urn:schemas-micasaverde-com:device:FloodSensor:1
manufacturer: Fibaro
model: FGFS-101 Gen5
device_json: D_FloodSensorWithTamper1.json
category_num = 4
subcategory_num = 2

Now reboot your Vera and you should be in business. A reboot is especially important for the Control4 driver. Until the reboot, the Vera was still reporting the old catergory_num to Control4.