Smartthings Alarm going haywire!

Hey there,

I have a the usual routines set up on my hub. Every morning, myself or my wife presses “Good Morning” to deactivate the sensors that are connected up to the security system and therefore the siren. It performs the operation and turns on some of the lights we need in the morning. However when my wife went out to work this morning the door sensor triggered the siren and we had an intrusion alert on our phones. I tried disarming the alarm but the siren wouldn’t stop going so had to turn it off from the “things” list.

All being well I asked my wife to try again and the same thing happened. Basically, the alarm system is not disarming. Some days it does, and other days it doesn’t. But I always get confirmation from the hub that the thing has been disarmed.

I’m getting quite annoyed as I only bought smartthings recently, and it’s proving to be quite unreliable.

I’ve ended up uninstalling smartalarm and unplugging the siren for now until I can work out what’s going wrong. Any ideas or advice?

Are you using Smart Home Monitor or the SmartAlarm (3rd party) app?

That is not clear to me.

General advice, routines can be unreliable, I use CoRe and when it comes to disarming SHM for my family I use CoRe for that routine instead of built in routines - you can tie them together and there are details I can share if needed - and additionally I have a watchdog core piston that essentially executes disarms multiple times to ensure a disarm desire has a very good chance of getting it right because I do not want to scare or cause acceptance issues with the family when it comes to the alarm and especially sirens. Sirens will kill any faith in the system rather quickly.

So I also do things like double check for presence and don’t allow SHM direct control of sirens, again I use CoRe and have it instead watch for events when SHM is active or home is AWAY and then check for some other things before it would even key a siren.

Sad that all this Bailing Wire and Duct Tape is required (Copyright @JDRoberts) but it absolutely is.

The other thing is that I have logged (as well others have) where SHM status in the cloud may be different than SHM status on the local device. This can cause false alarms as well. AFAIK, ST has looked at this but haven’t given meaningful attention to the issue. Doesn’t seem to be a priority.

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I was using SmartAlarm. I’ve disabled it and will just use the built in home security. I think I may have been doubling up which may have caused issues on occasion.

I’ve been using SHM that arms and disarms with a goodnight and good morning routine, respectively. It’s been pretty reliable in the last few months.

If you read enough posts like this on the forums, you’ll probably find that people’s experiences can be pretty variable. Give SHM a shot, but don’t be too surprised if it also proves to be unreliable.

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I’ve been using it for the last week and had no glitches, thankfully. My current experience = the more third party smartapps, the more problems.