Any thoughts on the benefits of more supervision benefits of PowerG sensors on the new firmware update? Is more often better, I presume at the expense of sensor battery life?
This is somewhat a question of preference.
Objectively, you gain quicker knowledge of issues with lower supervision interval. I’m not able to quantify the impact on the battery of setting a more frequent interval, but yes there would be an impact.
Keep in mind that in certain cases, common supervision error triggers aren’t a dire circumstance, such as borderline low battery + range. I haven’t been able to confirm through enough experience whether Power G sensors, like 345 and 319.5, may show supervision errors due to low battery before a low battery condition, but I would imagine that while it is less likely due to their natural range, it is probably still possible.
I would set my own supervision interval to 1 hour.
That’s helpful, thanks.
So essentially supervision is the panel and sensor talking to each other and serves as verification that the sensor is alive and present?
I ask because in a previous home we had a different diy system that claimed to have sensor supervision but it seemed doubtful. In that system, I was able to keep the magnet and sensor combo aligned together while removing the sensor/magnet from a window altogether and moved it beyond the range of the sensor (I took it grocery shopping with me, ha). I was never notified that the sensor went missing. I was even able to remove the battery from the sensor while the sensor/magnet were aligned and it took several days for me to be notified.
In that system I found out (the hard way) that the label was also not communicating with the Central station.
I presume I would be notified by ADC in either of these cases?
Correct, with supervision, the sensor is reporting a heartbeat signal to the panel at an interval. If the panel does not receive that message, the panel reports a supervision error for that zone.
Sensor supervision is typically between 1 hour and 24 hours. If supervision is set to 24 hours, you certainly could remove it from range of the system for most of the day and come back and the system would not know anything happened.