OK…now it’s official…for me, in my specific case, in spite of the vast array of ways in which SmartThings has been a huge disappointment to me for a while now, I just experienced one major success that really matters…
Though I had been looking at and drooling over the idea of Home Automation (and specifically, SmartThings) for a long time, the impetus that finally pushed the finance officer over the edge to get on my side of things was when our water heater busted. We had a small creek flowing in the basement, and I decided right there and then to never be caught so off-guard again.
So, while waiting for somebody to come and fix/replace the water heater (which, by the way, ended up being me doing the replacement job myself after considering the options), since I wasn’t sure yet exactly what was wrong and it may be a week or so before somebody was going to be able to take a look, we decided to get a v1 ST Hub and a leak detector (i.e. the water heater was ‘leaking’, but not 100% opened up yet; the bulk of the water was still in the tank).
After that, I got a few more leak detectors for various places around the house. One of the places was the inside-bottom of our furnace (one time, the drain for our AC unit got clogged, and caused water to drip down into the furnace/fan compartment, settling in the bottom, below the fan, and started coming out the bottom. After unclogging the AC’s drain, I put a water sensor in the bottom of that compartment below the fan to make sure to catch it earlier if it ever happens again.
Well, it happened again, last night. This time though, since I had the detector in there, I was able to get on it before it got out of hand. Of course, I now need to go figure out what I need to do to stop it from doing this (whatever it is that needs to be done to prevent an AC unit’s drain from clogging), but the primary takeaway from this leak detection event is that SmartThings saved me from a complete furnace melt-down/replacement (i.e. due to the path the water takes between the AC compartment through the furnace fan and mainboard compartment down to the compartment below the fan, water was dripping down some of the wires that are directly connected to the main circuit board). Oh ya…since we did our furnace replacement a couple years ago, I happen to know how many thousands of dollars an event like that could get into.
So, while I’m still baffled by the state of things in SmartThings Land, and I will continue to complain about all of that, this one success sure does put it all into perspective. Hopefully I will be able to allow it to condition (to some extent) how I express my frustrations about everything CRAZY going on around here.
Thanks, SmartThings!