In Use - IRIS by Lowes Hub:

As I mentioned at the start, I purchased this system to be integrated with my Iris by Lowes hub. I had actually purchased this last summer but never got around to installing it but due to some furnace issues around Christmas I finally got this in and that was a good thing. It turned out when the furnace work was done the hard PVC drain line for my water softener had to be removed. A flexible line was put in its place and I thought all was good. A few nights later my house alarm is going off at 2:30am. Turned out the drain line wasn’t secured enough so when it went to regenerate and it blew off. There was a mess to be cleaned up but it could have been so much worse had the valve and sensors not been installed. In the end all that was needed was a shop vac and some fans. So needless to say I am sold on having this system set up in some way shape or form.

Set up of the system via the Iris app was fairly simple, but not as easy or fast as the dedicated leakSMART process. With Iris you chose to add a device, then select the manufacturer, then you select the device.



After that you begin the pairing procedure. It works just fine but it is a lot more tedious than the dedicated app.



In all I have (7) leakSMART sensors and one valve paired to my hub. After a couple of weeks I started to have some issues with two sensors dropping off, this would cause them to beep and rapidly flash. A side result of this was significantly decreased battery life. My other devices were all reporting 80% life but the worst offender was at 50%. I suspect trying to constantly reestablish the connection just kills the battery. Since I wasn’t sure what was happening I reached out to leakSMART support and was pleasantly surprised that I had a real response within a day. After going through some troubleshooting the tech thought it might have something to do with the firmware of the sensors. leakSMART is currently pushing version 34 on their own platform and while this was provided to Iris they are yet to push it to devices. In fact, using a web portal created by thegillion which I found on the Living with Iris Forum I was able to confirm I was nowhere near current. You can find the thread with portal links here.

As you can see in the screen capture below, my sensors were all at firmware version 21. According to the tech they have made significant improvements to signal strength and battery life since this revision. The tech was confident an updated firmware would make a significant improvement but to test this he sent me one to test, that can been seen below as well.



After two weeks of testing I never got a push notification from the app indicating a sensor dropped. Not totally convinced the firmware was the fix I put the old sensor back right next to the test sensor. After a week it too was fine, or so I thought. What I didn’t realize was that push notifications must not be instant for device disconnects. So when I went to remove that sensor from Iris I saw it was already disconnected.