Tammy and I have been talking for a while about whether or not we wanted to continue with our existing home security system. It was installed within a month of us moving in by the good timing of the Vivint person coming by door to door. In the (almost) six years since, there have been some annoyances:
- The video camera has always been flaky
- The horrible resistive touch screen on the main panel
- Difficulties with the overhead garage door sensor
- Inability to add additional devices or get updated devices
- The Apple Watch app, which was so useful to begin with, stopped working with WatchOS 5
With these things, and our move towards Amazon Alexa in our smart home and the maturation of these technologies that didn’t exist in 2013, the monthly bill was getting more and more unpleasant to pay. We even called them a few months ago to see what opportunities there were to upgrade the system, but got nowhere.
Then we got a cold call on the weekend offering a complete upgrade of the system, additional components and installation. 🤦♂️
Today was the day and while there were a couple of hiccups, everything is up and running now. The installer relocated the panel a little which left a hole in the drywall that I will have to fix & paint. The list of new and/or replaced stuff:
- Updated main panel. So much nicer.
- Updated smart thermostat. Much simpler and easy to use.
- Updated indoor camera.
- New doorbell camera.
- New water flood sensor.
- Keychain fobs to arm/disarm the house.
It’s all controlled by a new app, and the new app has an Apple Watch app! We are back in business. Lost Amazon Alexa control for the time being. It’s not available in Canada. But with the better main panel and the watch app, I think it’s a much better (and probably more secure) tradeoff. ⌚️
Got rid of that extra WiFi hotspot that supported the old system, too. The new one is wired into our existing network.
Your making it hard to sneak into your place…Ha ha!