There is much discussion in the forums about security systems. Everyone has different feelings about what they need for peace of mind. And what they’re willing to pay for it.
My three minimum requirements for a security system are:
- it be able to send notifications even when power and Internet are off
Two) those notifications go to a professional monitoring centre that is authorised to call both fire and police responders
Three) the notifications are sent over cellular/mobile, not landline or Internet.
Currently, SmartThings does not meet any of those. Even though the V2 hub can do some operations when mains power and Internet are off, the operations it can do are very limited. Right now it is only the smart light app. It cannot operate the smart home monitor feature without an Internet connection. And it cannot do any notifications without an Internet connection. It just cues them up to send later.
The other issue with SmartThings is overall reliability. Things just randomly stop working for a while. Sometimes this is because of a bug, sometimes this is because of excess traffic, sometimes is because of maintenance that they don’t tell the customers about in advance. For example, when there’s a new hub update, it gets pushed out as firmware and takes your system off-line for about 20 minutes. Sometimes a very inconvenient 20 minutes.
So personally, I do pay a monthly fee to a different service. I use SmartThings for convenience home automation where an occasional service outage is not life-threatening.
But there are other people who just can’t stand to spend a monthly fee, or who feel the need to have all their systems operate out of one app. So they may use smartthings and just accept the occasional outages and the issue with operation during power loss. There’s a community-created smartapp, smart alarm, which is very popular and very sophisticated and works well for people in this priority group. It has several very useful features which the current official smart app does not have, including zone operation or and a delay before arming.
However, at the present time I don’t believe there is any purpose built glass break sensor or keypad that works well with smart things. But there are new devices being added all the time. Ideally, if they are zigbee devices, they should work in the US and the UK, which simplifies things a bit.
So there’s no one right answer. Again search the forums for “security” and you’ll find many discussions.
BTW, I am quadriparetic, so fire safety is one of my number one issues. I really want professional monitoring for that. Other people will have other top concerns.