With the exception of the Dome Water Valve Shut-Off I have been very happy with the Dome products and I really want to like the Dome Water Detector, but I just can not fully like this product, not because it does not work but for one very simple design issue. Now that is not to be taken as the Dome Water Detector does not work, because it does and works very well, only that there is an aspect of it that I do not like and I feel that is is a gross design flaw that should have never happened.

Lets start with what I liked about the Dome Water Detector, first and foremost has to be



the size of it and how it sits on its sensor contacts leaving no gap between the floor and the sensor. This is something that all sensors of this type should have and is one of my complaints about the Leaksmart Sensors. The Dome Water Detector is a small disc (kind of like a hockey puck just a little smaller) and can sit on the floor and wait for water to come. In my testing with SmartThings, the Dome Water Detector paired easily and worked flawlessly and had super-fast response time as compared to Leaksmart Sensors.



Now with that said you are probably asking yourself what is it that I don’t like about a sensor that works well and fast? Well that comes into play when we start talking about the extension cable. To use the extension cable, you must place the Dome Water Detector into a little cradle and then plug the extension cable into that. This cradle however attaches to the sensor probes on the bottom of the Dome Water Detector and connects them to the 3.5mm jack that the extension cable plugs into making the bottom probes unusable. Why is this, why should I have to give up the bottom probes to use the extension cable? To me this makes no sense and makes the Dome Water Detector too limited in its application. There really is no reason why we can not use both. Now I have seen some modifications done to the mounting cradle that allow both the bottom probes and the extension cable of the Dome Water Detector to function but we should not have to modify the product for this, it should have been designed that way from the beginning.

In the end the Dome Water Detector is a solid sensor if you just want to place it on the floor. It works exactly as intended and works very well. I would recommend it to people looking for a sensor for this application but for me it just bothers me that I can not use both sensing options at the same time.

Are any of you using the Dome Water Detector? Let me know in the comments below.

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