Zooz ZSE40 Z-Wave Plus sensor with Home Assistant and Node-RED

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The Zooz Z-Wave Plus 4-in-1 Sensor ZSE40 has become my go-to and I’ve replaced all of the other motion sensors in my home with them. They are fast, super cheap and can be mounted on the ceiling (which is my preference), corner mounted or mounted on the wall. These things are great. The Smartest House sells them for $20 refurbed on eBay , or you can buy them new at the Smartest House. They are genuinely good, and I highly recommend them.

With all of that said, there is one thing that may throw you for a loop if you’ve never come across it before. The binary sensor for the motion sensor does not register in Home Assistant. For whatever reason, it is not compatible. I almost sent the first one back because of this, until I start doing research and figured it out.

This thing has a lot of sensors. The “binary_sensor.zooz_zse41_4_in_1_sensor_sensor” is the binary motion sensor that does not register with Home Assistant.

It will forever read “off”, so it’s useless to us. I usually rename it “binary_sensor.motion_<room name>_motion_sensor_broken” and then disable it within the Home Assistant device manager.

Make sure to rename and disable.

So, the one we want to use is the “sensor.zooz_zse41_4_in_1_burglar”. Rename to whatever is appropriate for your application of course. With this sensor, “0” is off (no motion), and “8” is on (detected motion).

Now that we know this, it’s an easy jump to use it in an automation. I bought this one to use with my backyard flood light and Lanai lights. So let’s put one together, as an example.

Here is my current flow for the backyard. If the slider is opened after dark, the flood light and the Lanai lights come on at 100% for 10 minutes, then the flood lights are turned off and the lanai light are dimmed back to 10%, which they do automatically at sunset.

We’ll build off of this, and have the motion sensor trigger the flood light and set the lanai lights to 100%, to act as security lights when motion is detected.

Grab an events:state node and configure it similarly to this:

If you only want this to trigger at a certain time, grab a time range node and set it up similar to this:

We’ll use two call service nodes, one for the lanai lights, and one for the flood light.

Stick all these nodes together and you have something that looks like this:

This flow will turn the flood light and lanai lights on at 100% while motion is detected. Let’s set it up to turn them off after a set period of time. Grab a stop time and configure it however you want. I’m configuring mine for 30 seconds. I’m going to connect both the on and off output nodes from the motion sensor to the stop timer. Doing it this way, the timer will be immediately triggered when it detects motion, and will restart the the timer anytime motion is detected. When it no longer detects motion, the timer will be reset and the light will go off after the set amount of time.

**Small update at the end of this post regarding this part of the flow**

At this point, I’m going to link the stop timer with the call service nodes I already have configured to turn off these lights, but you may have to create your own if this is a new flow for you, and you’re not building off of an existing flow.

Here’s how the flow looks now:

The reason I created new call service nodes to turn on the lights, is because I want different behavior when motion is detected, on for 30 seconds instead of 10 minutes. Doing it this way is the easiest way of bypassing that 10 minute stop timer. The call service nodes to turn off can be reused because that’s all they do.

I hope this is helpful to anyone who picks up these Zooz 4-in-1 sensors and is having a time figuring them out. It took me a fair bit of research to get them squared away.

Small update. After I wrote this post and spent some time tweaking the flow, I noticed that the 30 second stop timer would override my 10 minute timer, breaking the original flow and making everything operate at 30 seconds. To resolve this, I added a time frame node and set it to 10:30p to 5a. My alarm arms at 10:30p and disarms at 5a, so we wouldn’t be using the slider anyways. Then I thought further, what if it’s the weekend and we’ve turned off the alarm and we’re hanging out in the backyard? So I added a current state node. Now, if it is after 10:30p and the alarm is off, it triggers the top part of the flow, turning everything on for 10 minutes, which should continually refresh the timer and keep the lights on as long as there is motion. Here’s how it looks now.