A bit of a whinge…sorry
I really liked the Samsung SmartThings Motion Sensors to start with…
great sensitivity (for me, no pets)
great response time
So I bought a few (6) and put them around the house to automate mostly lighting and presence notifications…
The hallway coming on at night without fumbling for the light switch was what won my wife over to my adventures in home automation.
So the most important component of everything I have installed in the house is the hallway light (Hue) and the hallway light motion sensor (smartthings sensor).
The Hue lights are amazing and work really well. Never had a problem.
The motion sensors… oh my goodness, it is as though QA/QC is an alien concept.
3 so far have failed, 2 of those I have had replaced and the 3rd has just gone.
So 2 replaced, just dropped off the network and no matter what I did (battery replacement, reboot, wifi channel changes as per other threads), they would not come back.
One sensor, worked as expected for 2 weeks, then one night went on a complete fit, started detecting motion at every few seconds…guess what, the battery drained in a matter of hours… awesome design.
The most recent one… just stopped being detected by the hub and no matter what I do will not come back.
The fact that there has been no warning… battery always reports 100% even when dead and I have replaced with a new one.
So how can I trust this technology? Even more so, now we are back to fumbling for the light switch it has brought the whole setup under the gaze of my wife who is not looking very impressed at my spending… gulp!
So I am off to buy a Fibaro motion sensor… I tried the Aeon one and the distance and sensitivity is rubbish.
If that is also rubbish I’m going to try the Elgato Eve stuff. The tech may be Bluetooth, but for goodness sake I just want the sensors to work… or at least report that they may not in the case of battery drain.
I’m really wondering why Smartthings would have mass market takeup when I have so many failures and also it is not plug and play.
Now, I understand the bandwidth issues of wifi and zigbee… but as a consumer why should I need to care… just work out of the box!!!
Ok whinge over or I might start on the battery design… poor choice of battery size, poor/none battery reporting, really poor battery housing contacts etc etc etc
Grrrrrr very frustrated!!!