Alexa action when contact sensor left open

Tips & Tricks
1

If you have a contact sensor left open, it would be nice to be able to have Alexa take some action (like make an announcement). Unfortunately, “left open” is not an available trigger in Alexa routines for a Wyze sensor. Only open/close can be used as triggers. Here’s a way around that. It does require an unused Wyze plug. It is similar to the solution here, but doesn’t require any other third party integrations…

  1. Name your spare Wyze plug “Alexa Trigger”.
  2. Create a Wyze Rule with trigger “contact sensor open for X minutes”
  3. Set action for this rule to turn on plug “Alexa Trigger”
  4. Create an Alexa routine with trigger “Alexa Trigger” plug turns on
  5. Set actions for the routine to whatever action you want Alexa to take (eg. announcement) and also have it turn off the Alexa Trigger plug.

When the contact sensor is left open for the specified time, the Wyze rule will turn on the plug, which will be detected by the Alexa routine which will turn the plug back off and do whatever else you’d like Alexa to do. Nothing needs to be attached to the plug.

Of course, if this gets implemented, then the plug would not be necessary.

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2

Nice work around.

But,
Is this an Alexa Problem ?
or a
A Wyze Wishlist item ?

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3

I don’t know if it’s something that Wyze needs to implement or that Alexa needs to. Most likely it’s a little of both.

That said, there is a wishlist topic for this here:

This feature is first on the list. Be sure to go VOTE for it if you haven’t already and comment on the need for this feature.

I’m afraid I don’t know anything about the priority for this, but I just asked and was told that my contact will poke the person responsible for this area about it. Fingers crossed.

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4

That helped me. Thank you. I also upvoted the feature request.

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