Integrating the Strips Guard door/window sensor with Home Assistant

My experience setting up and integrating the Strips Guard by Sensative with Home Assistant.

The Strips Guard is a general door/window-sensor which communicates over the Z-wave protocol. It has a thin design, and can easily be mounted between a door/window and it’s corresponding frame. It also claims a ten year battery-life. My particular use-case was to monitor and include a door in some automations, to which the Strips Guard seemed to be a nice fit.

Setting up the sensor

Initially I wanted to mount the sensor between the frame and the door. Sadly, the gap between the two was too narrow, and in the end I had to mount the sensor directly on the inside of the door.

Initially I thought the gap between the two magnets would be too wide, but this turned out not to be an issue.

Z-wave

Adding the sensor to Home Assistant was just a matter of adding a new node to my existing Z-wave network. I use the standard Z-wave component and Aeotec Z-stick for my setup.

Issues with open/closed state

The part I found a bit confusing was discovering which sensor value represented the open and closed state of the door.

The correct identifier in Home Assistant is named “sensor.sensative_strips_access_control”.

The value of “open” is 22, while the value of “closed” is 23. This logic can easily be wrapped within a Template Binary Sensor:

Remember to restart Home Assistant after you’ve added the new Template Binary Sensor to your configuration.

Unless your configuration has customization enabled by default, an icon representing the door will be displayed immediatly after a restart of Home Assistant. If you have customization enabled you’ll have to include the new binary sensor entity manually in a custom group.

Since the “device_class” is set to “door” it will have a corresponding door-icon when displayed in the dashboard:

Including the door sensor in a custom group

The new binary sensor can now be included in custom groups:

Referencing door sensor in automations

Naturally we want to have some automations for when the door is opened or closed. Here is a simple example of a trigger activated when the door has been open for 10 minutes:

Closing thoughts

The Strips Guard is overall easy to setup and integrate into Home Assistant. The sensor is plain without any flashing exterior, which makes it blend in nicely with most environments.

The downsides of the Strips Guard is it’s price tag. Unless you want to mount it between the door/window and it’s corresponding frame, I would argue that you have less pricey alternatives available.