According to the Honeywell website associated with this deal, USAA is no longer giving the 4 Lyric water leak/freeze detectors away. I did get in on time and set mine up right away when I got them. I wasn’t sure I was impressed with them, having to use the Lyric app and no integrations with anything else I use (IFTTT doesn’t impress me that much, either).
However, the Lyric detector by my 30+ year old water heater went off last night and the app di. d send a notification to my phone. Turns out the old beast was leaking a little, so I replaced it today. Who knows how long it would have taken me to notice without the detector. I probably wouldn’t have paid the big money for these, but getting them from USAA at no charge turned out to be a great thing for me.
I don’t believe I ever got an email for the gift card and it’s not in my spam folder now, but even without the gift card, I’m a happy USAA made these available.
A non-technical USAA-customer friend of mine (not a ST user) received a few of these thanks to the info from this forum that was passed on to him. He set them up last year and a recently had a major flood due to a pipe burst in the basement bathroom of his home. I asked him how the water detectors worked; apparently he placed the one in the basement near a water heater not close to the source of the flood. It never got wet. Yet he claims that he got an email with a ‘high humidity warnng’, not a leak alert. Is that true? Do these things trigger on humidity changes (I know that humidity detectors can be very sensitive. I have a hygrometer in my kitchen and can see the numbers rise moments after opening the dishwasher after a cycle). Impressive if it is using some kind of rate of change to trigger on (otherwise the normal humidity rise during the summer would produce nuisance alerts).
Also, is it possible to set up the app to text (rather than email) alerts? He is using an apple phone and only noticed the email sometime after the incident occurred.
bamarayne
(Jason "The Enabler" as deemed so by @Smart)
64
I have 8 of these in my house and they are all working great.
I have one in the a/c pan in the attic. I have it set to alert me based on temperature and if the humidity has gone outside of a certain range.
I do not believe the ago pushes notifications, I honestly can’t remember.
BTW, its impressive to realize how much damage gets done, and how quickly, from a pipe burst. At the time this happened to my friend, his son was home at the time. In the time it took him to realize what that funny sound was, discover water, phone his dad and find out how to locate and shut the main water valve off, the entire finished floor in the next room was flooded and required rip up and replacement.
Another good place for a leak sensor is near an ice-making refrigerator and its source of water (especially if you have one of those notorious DIY saddle valve connections). One of these let go while a neighbor was on vacation. The aftermath was several dumpsters full of old house debris and a months long reconstruction project.
