“I bought this to try it out and because I wanted humidity sensors. So far from the look of it, unlike the Fibaro motion detector it does not have the facility to trigger a message to associated devices if motion is detected but only if the light level is below a set amount. This means that you can't set it up to autonomously turn on lights when it detects motion but only if the light level is lower than a set level. So if you set it up to turn on room lights when it detects motion, it will always do this even in daylight. The Fibaro units can be set to disable the PIR in daylight. You can of course set all this up in your house controller although the Vera requires some LUA programming to do even such a simple action as an "If detected but only if..".”
“This device is very good and extremely small but there are two important things to know prior to purchase. The first is that it is not supported if you are using Indigo and the second is it does not come supplied with batteries and they are around £9 each and it takes two.”
“Nice little unit, as others have said, it's not quite as attractive as the Fibaro sensors, but does have a humidity sensor and USB Power to make up for it.
Adding to homeseer was fairly painless, it included correctly the first time, and only took a bit of fiddling to get the parameters set. In homeseer at least, the motion sensor was disabled by default.
The only minor issue I noticed was that the vibration sensor doesn't work, although for me, that's not a problem, since I had no intention of ever using it.
As others have commented, there are no batteries included, so unless you're going to use the USB power, you'll need to buy some.”
“My Vera Lite (several years in use) running the latest version of firmware on UI5 (1.5.622) just refused to correctly identify all the features of the Aeon Labs Multisensor Gen 5. I must have wasted two whole days trying to get it to work, assuming I was doing something wrong. Finally from Vesternet�?s help desk, I discovered that you have to email Micasaverde support in order for them to give you a link to download firmware 1.5.672 which is beta and not available for general release. With this installed, all is OK, but it came with a health warning from MCV. This is beta firmware and UI5 will not be developed further so you should seriously consider an upgrade to UI7. I have 3 Veras and so I have done this on 2 of them. I have to say that UI7 is coming along in leaps and bounds although, like Vesternet, I was sceptical at first. I really think that Vesternet should only sell this sensor with a warning that it will not work with UI5�?s
latest public firmware release and perhaps they should arrange with MCV that they can supply the link to 1.5.672 to save the tortuous route to finding the solution.”
“I like the size and shape of this sensor and also thought it would be great as they promote the Longer Battery Life but that is all I can tell you until I go out and spend another �8 on batteries. I think �60 for one sensor is a little much even if it is 6 in 1.”
“The sensor is very small, although not as small or as elegant as the Fibaro motion sensor. The multisensor 6 would not configure with the Fibaro HC2 running 4.054. I was able to successfully configure using a Vera Lite. Be warned that the unit does not come with batteries so make sure you purchase 2 CR123A batteries.”
“I bought this to act as an external motion detector so wasn't too happy when read this in the manual; "Please note that when installed outdoors, your MultiSensor should only be relied on for temperature, light and humidity readings and that the motion sensing capabilities should be disabled on your gateway in order to avoid false readings".
Secondly the Lux reading is pegged at 1000 lux, one of my other sensors is reading about 250 lux or so, so it doesn't seem to be able to function as a light sensor either. It's a dull overcast day today.
Thirdly the manual is well written but it doesn't match the device, for example holding down the z-wave button for 3 seconds does not put it into wake mode to make configuring it easy, instead you have to sit there pressing the button for 5 seconds or so to wake it up every time the Vera wants to send it some configuration parameters during setup, so I had to sit there for 5 minutes pressing the button every time the Vera put a red banner underneath the device. The manual states that you can just press the button for 3 seconds then the LED will stay lit and it will remain awake while the vera configures it, but this did not happen at all.
And after all of that messing about, I find that the unit detects movement constantly no matter what the sensitivity setting, so it's going straight back into the box. The manufacturer doesn't recommend you use it as an external motion detector, the light meter doesn't seem to work (the other review here also had this issue), the manual needs an update, so I'd suggest you buy this only if you want to see if you have the same issues and can work around the limitations regarding external use.”
“Overall this is a great unit, works really well with OpenHAB once setup, the only issue I've experienced is that the LUX sensor seems to only go upto about 100LUX before going straight to 1000. This however may actually be correct, as I've no way of testing this. The unit doesn't seem to be using battery much at all. I've set it to report all readings every 10 minutes, and in 2 weeks its used 3% of the battery, which would suggest approximately a 1 year battery life”
