New Smartthings user, love it, few questions for ya on use as a security system

[Scott_Barton (Scott)]

@JDRoberts

5. The silent panic button is a little complicated if you want one that will alert the professional monitoring service. You can use any of the fobs or buttons from 4) above, but because at present the scout monitoring service can only work with contact sensors or motion sensors, you will have to fooled inpt into thinking that a contact sensor has opened when you are using a different type of device. That can be done in SmartThings, but the conversion can only run in the cloud, not locally. Which means if the smartthings cloud or your Internet is down, the silent panic button would not work to notify scout. So you could set one up, but it wouldn’t run in all situations.

Everyone has their own requirements for peace of mind, so there are definitely community members using SmartThings as a security system. You just need to understand its limitations.

No cellular notifications

If either the Internet or the SmartThings cloud are unavailable, many functions will not work. This includes sending any notifications. It also includes anything you would normally do from the mobile app on your phone, including arm or disarm the system.

You could use the Universal Device Type Handler as a contact sensor that triggers your alarm and then use Smart Lighting which runs locally to turn it on with a secret button press.

For cellular backup, you could replace your current WiFi router with the PepWave Surf SoHo 4G WiFi gigabit router. If your cable internet goes down it will automatically switch to 4G cellular internet. You can get cheap pay as you go LTE plans for as little as $3/mo from H2OWireless.

For battery backup you can get a UPS to keep your cable modem, router, and SmartThings hub up for a few hours.

But that still doesn’t address the SmartThings reliability issues. SmartThings doesn’t always arm and disarm at the right time, lots of false alarms, etc. Commands not being sent/received. This is all sporadic and doesn’t happen to everyone, but it is enough that if you feel you need a 24/7 alarm system, ST probably isn’t for you. If you are OK with the occasional glitch or false alarm, then maybe ST will be OK for you.