Maintenance Mode

Maintenance Mode

This page explains what Maintenance Mode is and when to use it. Press the Maintenance Mode button before you change a battery, re-pair a sensor, or touch broken hardware. It tells the integration that you are actively fixing things, preventing your manual repairs from polluting the system's learned statistics.

Why It Exists

Device Sentinel learns each device's reporting rhythm from its gaps of silence. After weeks of silence, a manual fix, a battery swap, a re-pair, or a sensor reset by a button press, looks identical to a device recovering on its own. If that long silence were learned, the device would teach the integration that being broken for hours is its normal state, making every future freeze verdict for that hardware slower.

The integration recognizes two kinds of intervention by itself. It catches a recovery during a Zigbee2MQTT pairing window because the coordinator announces it, and it ignores anything recovering during a Home Assistant restart.

Maintenance Mode allows you to supply a signal to the integration that something frozen or unavailable is about to be fixed.

Using It

Press the Maintenance Mode button before touching hardware. The window opens for ten minutes by default, which you can adjust from 5 to 60 minutes under Advanced. Press the button again to end the window early; otherwise, it closes itself automatically when the time expires.

What It Changes and What It Does Not

While the window is open, any watched device that recovers, meaning it goes from frozen, unavailable, or unknown back to reporting, has that silence gap ignored and restarted rather than learned.

Detection is untouched. A device that goes down during Maintenance Mode is detected and added to the problem list.

The Fine Print

Opening and closing are both written to the system events log, so the daily brief can explain any discarded recoveries between them. If a Zigbee2MQTT pairing window and a maintenance window are both open, the pairing window wins the explanation. A genuine self-recovery that occurs inside your ten minute maintenance window is discarded.

For more details on alerts and learning rules, see FAQ and Troubleshooting.