With holidays coming up, what's the best way to ensure if your home stays dry? The Fibaro water sensor is suppose to help with that BUT how well does it work?

Specifically:

- How sensitive is the water sensor?
- How sensitive is the tamper sensor?
- Can it work on uneven floors?
- How well will it work with carpets?

I’m basically going to share with you the answers that I’ve come up with for all those question in this video. I’m also going to talk about why I might not use this product for a larger house.

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In general, if you need a portable water detection sensor and are running Apple Home, you’re stuck with the Fibaro. Which is probably still a better option than relying on your somebody else to check your home? I know when I’m told to do it, I sometimes fail to actually do it. and then I say I have.

If you're using Apple Home, make sure you get the Apple Home version!

The Fibaro water sensor is quite small and light and generally nondescript. I personally wouldn’t put it in the middle of the room as some of Fibaro’s marketing fluff might suggest. The water sensor actually has three sensors which include the water sensor, a temperature sensor and the tamper alert. And it floats!

The unit is battery powered by a 1/2 AA battery though there is an option to connect the unit to a constant power supply. The unit theoretically is suppose to last 2 years which is long enough for you to actually forget you had this unit.

-- So how sensitive is the water sensor? --

The Fibaro water sensor has three telescopic stands that detect water. The moment two of three gets wet, the unit will give a warning and send an alert to your device.

To figure out how sensitive the sensor is, we did several bath tub tests with Monty supervising. To figure out if the unit only needed one leg to trigger, we spend several minutes trying to squirt water onto the leg using a tiny eye dropper.

The sound alert is quite loud an would be useful if you’re running multiple sensors to know physically know which sensor has triggered.

To stop the unit from screaming, you basically pick it up and wait for it to turn off.

-- How sensitive is the tamper sensor? --

Now one of the features of the Fibaror water sensor is the tamper sensor. Some of Fibaro’s marketing fluff includes pictures of cats playing with the sensor so that made me wonder, how sensitive is it? In the video, I could move it slowly across the grout on my tiled floor. Or lift it up slowly. It only triggers from a sudden movement, whether it be a small kick or being lifted up quickly.

On Apple Home, the tamper sensor status can be seen in the details portion of the device. It rests approx. 60 seconds after it registered being tampered.

-- Will it work on uneven floors? --

The short answer is yes. Now there is an obvious limit to how uneven as anything greater than a couple of degrees will result on the stands being lifted off but the legs seem to be long enough to sit in the grout of tiled floors.

-- How well does it work with Carpet? --

The short answer is not really. Why? Because the Fibaro sensor triggers on water contact. A solid bead of water needs to hit one of the leads before the unit triggers. With carpet, that only happens when it’s soaked through.

I did two tests to come to this conclusion. I took a carpet sample and placed it on a flat surface and started to pour water along the edges of the carpet. In order to trigger the unit, I had to pour the water right beside the unit and it took a couple of pours before there was enough water in the carpet for the Water sensor to trigger. In total, I used a little over 2 litres of water for this test.

In the second test, I took another carpet square, placed the sensor on top of it and slowly filled my tub. As you can see the unit only triggers when the carpet is almost submerged. Keep in mind that this is a carpet sample, there isn’t an underlay so my tub is going to need to fill up another 1/2 inch before the Fibaro water sensors triggers. That’s a lot of extra water in the context of a large basement room before being notified.

So I’m not sure I would get this for a house where there might be a water issue in a carpeted area. By the time something bad happens, there’s a good chance that it will be too late for you to do anything to prevent water from soaking through the underlay and carpet.

I will note that the Fibaror sensor does allow you to attach a wired probe to the unit but that’s something that doesn’t come out of the box. In fact, I’m not sure where I’d by the probes as shown in their marketing fluff.