Moen Flo Smart Water Leak Detector, Drip or Flood Sensor Alarm for Home, 1-Pack, White, 920-004

Feeling Lonely? These Will Send Useless Alerts Dozens of Times a Day
Wow, these things are complete junk. About nine months ago, I bought eight of them to use on various faucets and other locations. Two were bad out of the box, and I never could get them to connect. I should have returned them but never bothered (for reasons that were entirely my own fault.)The app is required to connect them when first setting them up, but the UI for that is klunky. I set things up so that I would get both an alert on my phone and an email if there was a problem, and then I tested them by putting them in a bit of water. The alerts worked. So far, so good. The alarm noise was not very loud, but I was going to rely on the alerts on my phone and the emails.Then the “Device Offline” alerts started. Just one device every week or so. “On September 9 at 10:31 am, your Smart Leak Detector went offline. This could be due to a battery or internet outage.” It would be offline for minutes or hours and then it would come back online. One alert for off, one alert for on.Gradually, over time, the alerts escalated. The day before yesterday, I got more than twenty alerts from all six remaining devices. Yesterday, I replaced all the batteries (not cheap), thinking fresh batteries would solve the problem.It didn’t.And now, I will start researching other brands that will only send me an alert when there’s actually a problem.

Packaging and Performance to temp., moisture, and alarm volume
As other reviews state, the single unit I ordered arrived with the battery ajar and insulating strip off to the side so the battery had been draining since it was installed by the manufacturer. After setup, the Flo app indicated about 60% battery life remained. Will be good if Moen sends a new battery…time will tell.App installed on iPhone 13mini running iOS 16+. Many questions to answer to register but par for course these days. First try to connect to our home WiFi seemed to work (I had no prompt I entered my password incorrectly) but after finding the system not connected, I figured out the problem on second try. The app seems well designed. I set the acceptable operating range of humidity, and temperature I wanted and checked the boxes for email, text, and push alerts. After testing the hardware, I have yet to figure out how to delete the activity log, but the log can be filtered, collapsed and hidden. The alarm events can be deleted (just not the log).The primary sensor responded quickly to water. The main unit responds with beeping alarm for about 10 seconds and then stops and would not respond again if it remains sitting in water. If it dries, and is wetted again, a new alarm event occurs without manually resetting anything. The alarm beeping sound measured roughly 62dB at a distance of 5ft (1.5m). A nearby gas, forced-air furnace totally masked the sound of the alarming detector. Given the alarm shuts off after apprx 10 sec., one would need to be nearby, in the room to have a chance of seeing the LED or hear the alarm. (I believe most smoke alarms register around 95+dB for comparison). Don’t count on hearing this alarm over other household noise.Disappointingly, the primary alarm sensor toggles to the remote sensor when the remote sensor is plugged in. I was hoping to place the primary sensor on a floor drain covering and the remote sensor under the washing machine so if the drain from other sources backs up or the washing machine leaks, I would get an alert. You have a choice of one sensor or the other, but not both. The remote sensor responded quickly to water.To bluntly test for low temperature, I set the low end of the desired operating range to 40F (4.5C) and placed the unit outside where the winter temperature was 28F (-2C). The unit sensed the 40F (4.5C) lower limit in roughly 15 minutes and triggered the text and emails as expected. This 15 min delay was comparable to another remote sensor for a smart thermostat I also placed outside (indoor room temp. was approx 70F (21C). I did not examine how loud or if the alarm sound changes between the different sources of alarm (cold or moisture) but I did not hear the alarm inside when and if it was audible outside.I have no experience with other similar sensors on the market today so a comparison isn’t possible. I hopt these details can provide someone else useful information from which to make their own comparisons.I think for the price, and having experienced two human caused basement floods and one nature based flood during a deluge of rain, I’m satisfied with this purchase so far.Suggestions would be to allow for a volume adjustment of some sort (like toggle 62dB or 110dB) so the user doesn’t have to rely only on text and email alerts, don’t shut off one sensor when the other is active (better value for the $), add feature such as multiple emails to the app so that some users could receive alerts but not have access to the settings (i.e. for renters vs administrator, etc.)Hopefully my mostly positive impressions last as time goes on….speaking of which….how long does the battery last when it has 60% of life remaining….time will tell when the unit sends the 20% remaining battery warning I also triggered to ‘on’.

I purchased 4 of these devices:The first 2 paired without issue and appear to be working fine. The battery on the first one died within a few days, and the 2nd one lasted about 2 weeks before dying. These use CRA123 batteries which do not come cheap.I was never able to pair the 3rd one, no matter what I tried; it always failed once I connected to the wifi network. I tried adding the network manually, I tried resetting the router, I tried changing the AP name, I tried manually connecting to the network, every single attempt failed, and customer service is of absolutely no use.The 4th one paired, and despite having a brand new battery (not the one provided) it reported the battery at 43%. I took out the battery, and the app never informed me that the device was offline, I even waited 20 minutes to see, and still nothing, it was reporting the same 43% battery level and offline.Bottom line: I would not trust these things to alert me in case of a water leak. Given the cost of each device, I would have expected it work flawlessly, but I’ll be returning them and going with either Honeywell or pretty much any other brand.If your devices all appear to be working, I highly recommend doing a test to see if they are reporting correctly, dip the sensor in water, try taking out the battery, and see if the app reports it.

No instructions re setting up in box. Finally got it working after search youtube. Stopped working when wifi ( as a result of nbn outage) and haven’t been about to get it going since. Assuming battery supplied was depleted and can’t make any further suggestions until I purchase a battery – not a common one you have around the house so buy a few for future replacement