SmartThings Prevents a Burglary

We love hearing real stories from customers about how they’re using SmartThings to monitor, control, and secure their homes. Today, we’re sharing a story from Allison who writes in to tell the story of how SmartThings and her D-Link camera helped deter an intruder.

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“This morning, SmartThings and my D-Link security cameras worked as intended. A suspicious guy approached my front door at 2 am, holding what appeared to be a crowbar. As soon as my motion sensor turned on my front porch light, he looked right at my security camera and took off.

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“Here he is when the light turns on…”

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“…and here he is changing his plans.”

This is exactly what I wanted to achieve. I have a couple more layers of security if he had continued, but I use SmartThings primarily as a deterrent to automate my lights and send motion alerts to my phone at night. I am very glad the system worked and even more tempted to buy a V2 Hub because my internet went down the two previous nights.”– Allison

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Join the conversation! 9 Comments

  1. Be careful getting a v2 hub. There is no migration path whatsoever, so all of your devices, apps, automations, etc., will have to be completely redone from scratch. Smartthings promised a migration but won’t deliver on that promise. It’s unfortunate.

    Reply
  2. Internet still needed for v2 hub

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    • Yeah so far the only benefit of my v2 hub has been that I was able to give my v1 to my parents. However it is still much more reliable than my v2… I have issues with Zigbee sensors and bulbs losing connection every day. Something I never experienced on my v1, and still doesn’t happen now that my parents use it.

      If only we could run our own local cloud on a Raspberry Pi or something…

      Reply
  3. Do not get the V2. V1 is much more stable. Never had any issue with V1, whiel V2 keeps crashing/disconnecting/losing connection

    Reply
  4. So, I migrated my v1 to v2 a week ago and it was terrible. 40+ devices took around 7 hours to fully remove from the old hub and add the to the new hub.

    That being said, a lot of work has been done over the last couple years and the SmartApps are much more robust than they were. The clean slate difficulty has given me the opportunity the use less apps to do much more, while learning more about z-wave in the meantime. Actions also seem to be much faster when issued directly from the app.

    Maybe mine will start crashing, but it hasn’t yet.

    PS…the scenarios demonstrated in their new commercial are small-fry stuff… they show connected devices not real automation… This stuff can get pretty satisfying when you plan it out.

    Reply
    • Are you not having massive issues with zigbee-based sensors/devices delayed or working at all? Routines regularly have issues as well.

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    • My v2 has been flawless with over 40 devices. Just faster. I have 2 bulbs that don’t like it when the power goes out and they need retrained but that was true with v1 as well. Fingers crossed my v2 experience has been very smooth.

      Reply
  5. They have a LONG way to go with smartthings, server was unresponsive/slow for 2 weeks, still issues because of the over-dependency with their faulty cloud services. Frequently status changes take hours to update (home, away, back, night etc)

    Reply

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