A friend of mine and I were discussing integrating Fire Alarms into our Vera’s but we didn’t want to spend money on buying Z-wave enabled Fire Alarms especially with 7 or 8 of them per house.
After going through a couple of options and ideas we came up with the following solution:
1) 1 x Door/Window TR Sensor RS100HC (disregard all the notes about Nexia) = $38
That’s it!
Typically most Fire Alarm detectors are daisy chained together. If that’s the case you have with a single Z-wave device all of them integrated into your Vera.
The reason why I chose this Z-wave device is because of the cable connectors inside the device (you can throw away the magnet) but I should point out that you need to close the device and make a small hole at the side for the cables or it won’t work at all.
First picture you see the logical test conducted and those 2 cables (see pic) trigger the Z-wave and the second picture shows how I embedded this in my basement Fire Alarm.
Result: It doesn’t matter which Fire Alarm goes off, Vera will get notified. I hope you find this information useful as it saved me about $700-$800 replacing fully functioning Fire Alarms. If you do, press the + sign under my name on the left 😉
Note: If your Fire Alarms are already integrated into your Alarm System I would suggest to integrate your Alarm System into Vera which should expose those automatically. This is what I had in my last house but not in my new house.
