Your worst home automation purchase?

Fantastic. Reminds me of my life hack for growing up with super stingy parents when it cam to the thermostat...under NO CIRCUMSTANCES were you to TOUCH the thermostat. It was set where dad wanted it, and that's that.
So whenever I got hot at night, I'd get up, cup my hands around the thermostat, and breathe hot, slow, moist air into it until I had the temp reading around 90...the cool would usually run long enough for me to get back to sleep at the very least. :slight_smile:
I still do that to this day if I just want a little cool down.

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I just got an email saying that Leeo is potentially shutting down, so I guess that might end up being worse than my Hues or August locks. :frowning:

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Hue Dimmer, never worked for more than three days. Would always drop off mesh when my wife would need it to work.
ERIA bulbs, Flakey always turning on at odd times.
Sengled A19 CT bulbs, Terribly narrow temperature range. The Sengled A19 is a few bucks more with much better CT range and full color.
Some random contact sensor (Sage) that was recommended by Amazon. False and missed detection's on a regular basis. I use it for a temp sensor in my daughters Hedge Hog cage so not a total waste.
Every none-CT or Color bulb because really what's the point!

+1

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#1 VeraSecure....after dealing with the slow responsiveness of Smartthings, and being locked out of the house because the cloud connection was down.

Vera's marketing sold me hook line and sinker on the "supposedly" local, fast and "supposedly" support for every device imaginable. It was none of those things and $300 wasted

#2 Nest Protect.....should have went with a local device

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My first and last purchase on Alibaba. Which was a Zigbee ZLL based touch switch that I got to use with my Hue bridge. It worked with the bridge and I could control some Edison bulbs through hue, but it reported nothing back. Always read "unreachable" even though it worked. That I could live with, but for some reason the manufacture decided to have it make a loud "beep" sound every time it was used. Either remotely or physically. As if the loud relay inside clicking wasn't enough. I honestly think they added the beep to cover the clicking noise. Seriously.

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Glad you are happy with it. I returned the overpriced ball. It was okรฉ, when they had one with Ethernet. Now it's wifi only and that's just wrong for stability. Also the community isn't a friendly one.

I've had the same experience with those they seemed great when I first installed them as they were hidden but soon I realized that reliability was second to appearance and even for appearance I had to use a marker on one to match it to a wood door since they didn't offer different color plastic covers.

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Sengled Element Plus bulbs. Terrible product. The rest of the Sengled line might be good, but those bulbs are not. Refused to stay paired with Wink, SmartThings or Hubitat.

Replaced yesterday with Hue Ambient White. Easy solution. Works beautifully. Should not have waited so long.

I seem to remember someone being all-in on Sengleds--not sure if that was you. :slight_smile: I bought one to test myself (and regrettably helped someone outfit their whole house with mostly the Color Plus bulbs) and so far haven't had problems with things staying paired, but I have had problems with them not working well unless group messaging is used and with them occasionally not responding to color temperature, level, or color commands (including Hubitat's pseudo "scenes") unless sent twice in a row. Unfortunately, this seems to be a general Zigbee bulb problem for me, not just with Sengleds (this is why I mostly backtracked on my experiment of trying Hue bulbs directly paired to a dedicated Hubitat).

That being said, I find Hue bulbs produce much better shades of white: they're brightest around 4000K (cool white) but still good at about 2700-3000K (warm white, the only shade Sengleds seem to do well). Warmer whites are also much more "believable" on the Hue bulbs--e.g., to get a Sengled anywhere close to Hue's "Relax" scene, I had to switch to color mode (CT mode didn't cut it) and try something orange-y.

So to go in the opposite direction of this post, a Hue Bridge with Hue bulbs is one of the best automation purchases I've made. It's really what got me going into whole-home automation in the first place, since at the time Hue had no physical and very few automated controls (I probably would have found myself somewhere here anyway eventually even if they did since it's still more limiting).

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I believe it was someone else. Although I probably had some praise for the Element Plus bulbs at some point, since early on they seemed to stay connected to HE and were working well. But despite replacement bulbs shipped from Sengled under warranty, they turned out to be duds on HE, just as much as they were in Wink and SmartThings.

In fairness, they probably work great on a Sengled bridge, and thereโ€™s perhaps a firmware update that fixes their issues. Mine are on firmware 0.0b00/0.0b2e - so yeah, that could be the issue right there. I fired up the Wink hub and have one connected (I think :thinking: :crazy_face:) to see if it gets a firmware update, but I didnโ€™t see anything discussed about Wink updates of Sengled, so it might not be available.

The Element Plus are very unique with their ability to be controlled by both Zigbee and a conventional dimmer. Sengled tried something that no one else would. Gotta give them points for the effort.

where to start...
Lightify Bulbs! bought 20 18 months ago, the last one spluttered out last week! bye bye!
most expensive (though not really their fault) the Nuki locks! cost me a small fortune to be able to use them in the UK
harmony hub? look IR is now way to automate anything! and actually the cheap broadlink thing was better than the harmony (and PLEASE don't mention "universal" remotes!! the only thing "universal" about pretty much all of them is their lack of one particular button, that always turns out to be vital LOL

the ring doorbell, that rang after the delivery driver had not only gone, but was at home eating his tea! really it was that slow here!!
the Hello is SO much quicker (and more expensive :open_mouth: )

Lightwave? unreliable..
energinie totally useless cloud service, the hardware is fine, they just never stayed connected
Hue bulbs, on and off the mesh every couple of days
smartthings motion sensors.. a couple of months max on ST and a few hours max on HE

on the plus side, Smartthings actually never gave me huge issues, it worked for years, in fact my clearest reason to change to HE was boredom LOL
YeeLights, say what you like, these have been so much more reliable than "any" of the other bulbs I have bought! the ceiling lights are brilliant too (they even come with a bluetooth remote as well as network)
Lifx bulbs not as good as Yeelights but OK

I don't wan't to talk about things like orvibo (although the sensors were OK on ST I haven't tried them on HE yet

all my X10 my broadlink stuff etc etc I made up a 60KG box of it and sold the bloody lot on eBay!

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I forgot about this. To be honest, I never really had problems with the bulbs themselves, aside from them wanting to drop off my Zigbee network if left physically powered down for a while (not what I'd normally recommend for smart bulbs, I know, but it happens sometimes). My biggest disappointment is that they won't let us "crossgrade" to the ZLL firmware in the US anymore, which it apparently still ships with in other countries. This means you can't use it on Hue, and we all know how bad bulbs tend to be with ZHA on a "regular" hub (unless you have one dedicated just to those)--and their promise of "it's because we're standardizing on Zigbee 3.0!" didn't work out either since Hue has supported that for at least a year or so now, yet as far as I know these bulbs are still stuck on ZHA 1.2 and still useless there. (I'd love to hear that I'm wrong.)

Yet another purchase I forgot about. I've heard it's better if you're hardwired, but the appeal of Ring to me at the time was the battery and the fact that I didn't have (functional) wiring. Mine wasn't usually that slow, but there were certainly delays, and no matter how much I adjusted it I got spurious motion alerts during the day. I still keep it around as more or less a smart button, but I've replaced the video with Wyze (not officially supported outdoors, but mine is well protected--and also not directly integrated with Hubitat, but that's of little consequence to me) and a PIR motion sensor (again not normally good outdoors, but...), both of which I can angle to work well. Typical doorbell height just doesn't seem to do that. Wyze video is a bit delayed sometimes too, but I guess I never found the live "chat" very useful on Ring, so I don't really miss that. I'll probably replace the entire thing with just a smart button (or the Aeon) at some point.

So all this thread actually did was to stir up sometimes long forgotten frustrating memories for many many people. Thanks a lot, @bill !!!! :wink:

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Or it prevented new novice users from buying crappy products

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Hopefully, but you know everyone eventually buys something that will become their worst. It is just part of the process. Just hope our other halves aren't on some other community page comparing their worst partners. :wink:

Worst for me = the items I spent the most on and got the least value out of... So I would say:

  • Two Nest Thermostats (I had them early on when you couldn't adjust the deadband, and the default 2 DegF of deadband allowed the temp to swing WAY more than I thought was comfortable)
  • Four Ecobee 3/3 Lite Thermostats (was great until wanted to use them in automation, then the continual cloud unreliability made them untenable).
  • Four ZTS-500US Thermostats (so bad I threw them in the trash rather than sticking some poor soul with them)
  • Four Keen Vents (batteries last <4 weeks on Hubitat for me. Had them 6+ months on ST without changing batteries. No idea why)

The Nest "Maintenance Band" still is not user adjustable, AFAIK. I still have two of them and hate this one specific aspect of them.

Aside from that I really liked the look and operation of it... But my family was CONSTANTLY complaining that it was too hot or too cold. Finally gave up on them.

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Nest thermostat, protect and cameras all cloud based and with that last Nest cloud outage completely screwed up my nest account and can not connect one of my protects 2 months past warranty. Nest support told me "to bad"and to go buy another one. (yeah right!)
Should have stayed far away from any cloud devices.