I've used over Konnected/HE/Noonlight for over a year as my primary home alarm system. A few months ago, I happened to notice nothing was working and the logs showed they had not worked in a few weeks. I rebooted the three 12 point konnected boards and HE C7 and everything worked for a day. Then, with help of this community, I noticed I was getting memory leaks. I bought another HE C7 to see if it would be better. I have 10 Zwave devices (two are smoke detecters) that may be part of the problem. Anyway, It seems I have a pretty klugy system with all these parts and each having it's own slow support system. I bought a Blue by ADT system and a Simplisafe system and tested both for a while. I've chosen to stay with Blue since it meets my minimal requirements and I have several cameras from Nest and Blink to self monitor the video. I'll use HE for home automation and "checking" my Blue by ADT system since I now have redundant sensors on the doors and windows. Hopefully, I can resolve my memory leak on my HE soon and get my second one (not in real use yet) to stop saying "cloud connection is unavailable" even though I have "hub protect and remote admin" on both. I used Noonlight 3 times and was very impressed with their response time. It was only a few seconds each time. I'm impressed with each component by itself, but not being a real programmer, the combination is a stretch for me for life safety systems.
Good call.
Hubitat has always recommended against using the product for fire or life safety purposes.
If you want almost 100% uptime, you need a purpose-built system.
If "good enough" is good enough/better than nothing, then consumer grade automation hubs are ok. But you can never assume anything near 100% availability.
Agree 100%, great call IMHO. In several threads, I have voiced my opinion (albeit MHO) that security/life critical functions should be handled by UL approved dedicated purpose built and designed systems. I use a 64 zone DSC system which I have “linked” via Envisalink to HE to use its door, window and motion sensors for home automation, but still stands as a stand alone system for security completely independent of HE.
I too found Konnected “kludgy” with the multiple modules needed to cover 64 zones, all the extra wiring (not to mention the cost compared to the Envisalink integration). The main problem was losing the reliability of a purpose built, dedicated alarm system which has been reliably working now for 25 years. JMHO. Because at one time I did purchase a Konnected system to compare with Envisalink (returned/cancelled the Konnected after success with the Envisalink), I recently had been getting investment offers from Konnected. They have been trying to raise investor funds to continue to develop the company and if I am not mistaken have raised about $1 million (or was it $100,000? Not sure as I have since deleted all their email solicitations) by soliciting investments from people who have purchased their system.
At any rate, although I am not familiar with Blue, I think your decision is a wise one to not rely on HE as a life safety device and to go with a dedicated, certified and purpose built system.
Edit: just some typos.
Good plan. I use a Honeywell Vista panel and Envisalink... but HE can go belly up and life/safety all still works.
We do not recommend that Hubitat Elevation be used as a "life safety device".
I now think your (Brad5) way is the best way and certainly cheaper than the way I began.
It definitely works. Though the native envisalink integration is a beast. When hub mesh allows me to mesh HSM I will probably move it to its own hub.
Yes, with 64 zones utilizing several motion detectors in addition to the usual window and door sensors, Envisalink is (to be understated) “quite chatty”, lol, but remains an indispensable part of my HE automations.
I thought I saw somewhere it was already in the works... @gopher.ny not sure whether this is something slated for a future release?
If you don’t want to wait, I put it into [Release] Hub Variable Sync a while back. (Also works without the hubs being on HubMesh.)
What exactly do you have in mind?
The Envisalink community app is a beast... it accounts for a significant portion of processing resources on the hub and it's pretty chatty. So I'd love to move it and HSM to a secondary hub and more or less dedicate that hub to HSM and Envisalink. But I would like to be able to access HSM's functions from rules running on my main hub. @thebearmay's hub variable sync app gets really close but the way Envisalink and HSM interact creates timing issues which don't make a good fit for hub variable sync. However if the demand for this kind of functionality is minimal I definitely wouldn't make it a priority. There are other ways around the challenge, they just require more work.
Though i am sure they are fine, being a refugee from Smartthings after having the Smartthings ADT panel I won't give a dime to ADT. Neither of them handled that right.
I replaced all of it with Ring Gen 2 gear. That way if i need a dedicated alarm system I could switch it all over to Ring alarm without much hassle. Though i am sure for a larger 64 zone system a full blown wired system is best.
Update. I’m going with SimpliSafe instead of blue by ADT. I had six devices report “low battery” the first week and six more the second week. I discovered SimpliSafe had a monthly monitor price close to Blue. About $19. And they offer outside siren that Blue doesn’t. So Ive switched.
Interesting. I’m in the ring alarm camp, mostly for the pricing including the cloud video (good and bad, right?) The sensor integration through the unofficial app is also nice.
With the ring price increases for monitored service this year, curious on what else is out there being used for a similar price point. Thanks for the write up on other options.
How about we give up on this thread or change the title. It’s already been stated that Hubitat does not recommend the use of the hub for life saving applications.
There are plenty of Alarm system threads already.
Agreed.
Yup. @bobbyD - can this thread be closed? The OP has a solution that meets their needs (Simplisafe), and so it’s time to move on.
This one has wandered off track...
