To preserve battery life, most* Insteon sensors support sending broadcast a check-in message approximately every 24 hours. We call this message a heartbeat. When the heartbeat message is detected by the Insteon Hub, it lets us know the sensor is within range and that presumably its battery is ok. In addition, any sensor activation that the Insteon Hub hears (motion detected, opening or closing of a door, etc) will also be considered a check-in message.
For some sensors that do not get activated on a regular basis (such as leak sensors), the heartbeat message is the only thing telling the Insteon Hub that the sensor has checked in. When determining when to show a sensor offline, we found that sometimes a heartbeat may be missed. This could be due to a few different factors such as scene programming, a schedule being executed, etc. So, to avoid false negative reporting, we decided to wait for 3 consecutive missed heartbeats before showing a no response state for the sensor.
Prior to this update to Director app and currently in the old Insteon for Hub app, if a sensor hasn’t been heard from, users wouldn’t know about it. In fact, the state would continue to show the last known state (‘no motion’, ‘dry’, etc).
We also realize that some of you rarely open the app, and therefore may not be aware of a sensor not checking in as expected. Therefore, we plan to introduce proactive messaging when your sensor falls into this state. We appreciate your patience while we work on getting that feature launched.
We hope you appreciate the geekier details. Thanks for reading!
*Early revisions of Insteon sensors do not support sending heartbeat broadcasts. The Director app will indicate if your sensor supports this feature or not. If not, Director will not be able to tell when your sensor needs a battery change or other communication issue. If your sensor falls into this category, and it doesn’t trigger scenes on a regular basis (something that, if it fails, would be an indication of a problem), we suggest checking the unit on a 6 to 12 month basis.