I just ripped my worst purchase out today and am wondering about other's experiences. In my case it is hands down the Neato Botvac, followed closely by the Mint/iRobot robot sweeper.
With the Neato, I had visions of triggering a vacuum run on away mode, and that in fact worked. The problem was that the robot got stuck on EVERY SINGLE RUN. I'd come home to find it had completed only 10% of its run before getting stuck on an area rug fringe, or over a cold air return, or between some chairs. This for $600? Damn.
The mint sweeper was cheaper and worked better but wasn't automatable and had one of the worst tech design flaws I've ever encountered. It would complain endlessly if there was some charging issue with a series of beeps every minute or so and it would start this up in the middle of the night until you got up, unscrewed its battery cover, and ripped the battery out.
I'm just taking my $800 or whatever it is loss on these 2 items. I'll never buy another robot. Not going first on the "self driving" cars either. Big tech tends to over promise and under deliver eh?
We have two Neato Botvac D3s and love them. 1 is setup using no go lines, which was a challenge to setup the first time since it has to get through the house once before you can setup the virtual lines and it kept getting stuck under chairs, tables, couches, ... however using the magnet strip that came with it and moving that around to keep it out of areas where it got stuck previously I got it to finish and setup the lines. After that it has worked perfectly every time except when the cat toys get pulled down to the floor and it sucks one up. The other one is in a small room with a step and never gets stuck so never needed the no go lines setup. I have left them both on my ST hub though (they are the only reason I still use it) as I haven't seen an app capable of starting them with no go lines when we leave for Hubitat yet. What app were you using?
Belkin WeMo smart bulbs.
Not because they are WEMOs but because they are smart bulbs.
Wife and family kept turning the switch off making them non-smart.
Wish I had gone straight down the Fibaro Dimmer or smart switch route straight away.
Now it doesn't matter if the switch is either turned off or on.
I don't think there is anything that can stop us from making poor decisions and the same goes for future poor decisions. Any time I see questions about "what should I buy", and we have all been there, the only answer should be, "whats your plan look like". I have piles of unused stuff, that I thought was a good direction to begin with but not for long. I should have spent more time planning out my ultimate goal. I still would have ended up with some unuseful stuff but certainly less.
So far the worst things that are part of my system are a set of Quirky TAPT switches. Difficult to pair and then they seem to lose their minds with any power failure (storm or home project related)... At this point the two I have are just switches. "If" I ever get the added to my Hubitat there might be some limited value due to their separate on/off buttons but to date they have just been painful.
Outside of that... "successful" Kickstarter HA projects that never provided the product.
X10 was pretty good in its day. I used it for my smart home for 25 years. But yeah. There was the whole Internet, LED, noise on the powerline, etc. thing that eventually became too much to tolerate. But if it were not for X10, I wouldn't be able to report my worst home automation purchase ...
An X10 controlled modification to make any thermostat smart. OK, what it was was a heat strip that wrapped around your thermostat. You could turn your HVAC heat down by basically cooking your thermostat.
I want to add Aeotec Recessed Door Sensor Gen5 to my list. I have 3 of them.
Problems:
They require you to bore fairly substantial holes in your house
They're a pita to join the zwave network
They mis-report contact state fairly frequently thus breaking any other automations that rely on them.
Some of my door jambs have swelled and/or settled in such a way that its' difficult to get the circuit board in and out of the housing to change the battery without breaking bits off of it and ruining it, which I've done.
They have a battery life that's about 1/5th that of my other zigbee contact sensors in a best case scenario.
Of the 3 I have, one of them has failed to the point that it now drains the battery in about 4 hrs. I just ordered a replacement from monoprice, which looks like the same device at about 1/2 the price of the Aeotec, so add "overpriced" to the list.
Bottom line- unreliable at the one and only think it's supposed to do well, overpriced, and has a short battery life. On the upside, they are nice and discreet.
What a terrific product with excellent hardware and UI but horribly crippled by lack of ANY product additions or updates in nearly 3 years now. If it wasn't on their supported list, you couldn't even add it. No support for user drivers or apps either, so you couldn't fix anything that way. For a while there the constant cloud outages happened like clockwork. Almost like someone shut the server off on Friday when they left for the weekend to save power or something.
There was about a 12 month period back in 2014-2015 or so where it was the best out there. After that stupid so called rap star bought Wink, it sank even faster. So promising, and pretty, but so frustrating to use.
I’ve probably got a very different experience with these products; but I’m going to say that Hues were my worst purchase by far. I had a few start dying after about 3-mos to a year of use, Philips support was far from helpful and refused my warranty because they didn’t like my fixtures, despite them being open.
I switched to MagicHome and Sylvania and it’s been smooth sailing. Sylvania customer support is pretty great, too.
Mine would have to be the Lowe's Iris Smart Meter Link. Replaced household meter, device never supported with V2 hub. No refund due to not being connected. They were still available for sale before Lowe's shut down Iris.
I know that Vera Plus is far from as bad as it gets, but even with as unhappy as I was with SmartThings at the time, I wasn't happy with Vera (limited device compatibility and limited possibility for custom devices). I returned it and was happy-ish with Home Assistant until Hubitat came along. If I didn't already know better than to buy certain other hubs, I'm sure they'd be on that list. (I don't regret SmartThings because at the time it was decent and the idea behind it is great; Hubitat just did it better.)
Device-wise, I'd say the Monoprice 15271 motion sensor. I bought several when they were on sale but ended up returning all I still could--they're so slow, even by Z-Wave norms, that they were nearly completely useless for the lighting automations I bought them for (which I did when I tried to switch away front SmartThings; only Hubitat seems to support Zigbee to the extent that ST did). I've relegated one I kept to outdoor usage. Again, not as bad as it gets, but it's the worst for things I'd otherwise expect to actually work. (So random IoT Wi-Fi devices don't count.)
EDIT: It was before I had any automation platform (or at least that's when I pre-ordered/backed it), but I can't believe I forgot to mention the Lockitron v2...
(So random IoT Wi-Fi devices don't count.)
