re: Favorite Smart Home device(s).

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I'm about to place my home on the market and need to purchase a good Wi-Fi enabled deadbolt doorlock w/keypad for the realtor to gain access with a separate PIN when showing the house.

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get a $45 gen1 eufy and call it a day,

i needed to replace 5 door locks when we moved and i didnt have the budget for $200 smart schlage locks from home depot and eufy is literally the best and easiest thing ever. great value for price.

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just ordered the Rachio 3. Hopefully I can figure out how to install it. This morning was the last time I hope I ever wake up to my sprinklers running in the rain.

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SUPER SIMPLE.

2 gripes:

1. is they didn't include colored tags you could use to label the old sprinkler zone wires as to what goes to which zone. i wrote a 'strongly worded letter' to the company suggesting they add this so i'm not using a sharpie and ripping pieces of painters tape into strips to mark my zone wires when swapping it. this couldn't add but what...50 cents to their cost to throw someting like that in the package?



2. DON'T set it up initially w/ android phone. hopefully you have an iphone laying around. i had a helluva time getting it on my wifi network and ended up the tech support sent me a .BAT COMMAND LINE file to run on my PC which i had to use to bootstrap the system so the app would recognize it. he said if i had set it up on an iphone initially, it would have taken 30 seconds. PING me if you do have any setup issues. I'm an expert now.

indoor or outdoor?

it took me longer to label & tape up my existing wires than the actual installation.

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hope I ever wake up to my sprinklers running in the rain

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mine is better; i woke up to the system turning on at 3am spraying pond water all over my freshly washed cars and i had to get out of bed, walk outside down a flight of stairs, trapse across lava rock barefoot and turn the damn thing off in the dark.


NEVER EVER EVER again

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As long as I can figure out the 1-for-1 wire placement and there are no "WTF is this wire for?" moments, I should be ok.

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protip: take a photo of your existing wiring/connections before you do anything.

take your time. label each wire as you pull it out.

this is pretty easy to swap wiring; irrigation controllers all basically work the same way.

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For anyone that uses a smart garage door opener, has anyone figured out how to do the location open/close? What I mean by that is when I get into my neighborhood, my MyQ device automatically opens the garage and when i leave the same zone, it will close the garage?

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Sounds like a job for Home Assistant.

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For anyone that uses a smart garage door opener, has anyone figured out how to do the location open/close? What I mean by that is when I get into my neighborhood, my MyQ device automatically opens the garage and when i leave the same zone, it will close the garage?

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My Meross controller hooked up to my Liftmaster opener allows that.

If you’re an Apple user it pops up in CarPlay when I’m a half a mile away from home to open the garage door.

Super simple little $25 add on is basically the only smart device we have at our house.

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is they didn't include colored tags

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They stopped including them??? Madness. They had the tags when I installed mine (probably v1), just like Nest had stickers. The Wyze I installed in my new house had tags, and cost a lot less than the Rachio. It does have a subscription (I think $10 a year for weather), but that's really weak of Rachio.

ETA: Every house should have a Brother label printer with the proper tape to label anything and everything. There's "cable" tape which is designed to stick to itself and not pull itself apart like the standard tape designed for flat surfaces. It's $50 you'll use over, and over, and over.

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I've been putting cheap zigbee motion sensors all around the house. I love those little things

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Same, also use the zigbee temp/humidity sensors to turn on the exhaust fans in the bathrooms. Home Assistant is the tits! When my Protect cam identifies an animal on the patio it turns on a couple of fans.


Just installed a Shelly Uni+ and zigbee vibration sensor on my generator to monitor the battery voltage and get notifications when it starts/stops.

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I see these mentioned a few times - any reason X sense vs other brands?

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I'll be honest in that I didn't do a lot of comparison. I started with a Mailbox motion detector because it was inexpensive and said it would work up to 1700' away and had good feedback. I live on a heavily wooded lake lot. My mailbox is about 500' away from the house so I wanted to know when it was opened. It worked perfectly. Then I purchased two more Mailbox motion detectors. I screwed one of them under the upper back part of our garbage can. I could then know when the garbage was picked up. I used a simple clamp to attach another Mailbox detector underneath the back part of my boat cover on my Jon Boat that sits just out of the water on our lake bank about 100' away from the house. I've tested it and when I lift up the cover, an alarm is sent to my phone and also the base station.

So I was impressed with the mailbox motion detectors, and then I decided to try their solar motion lights. I have a half dozen of them post mounted all aimed to trigger anything that walks by that is over about 3' tall. So any Raccoons, possums, skunks, ground hogs, etc. that walk by will not trigger the lights. If a person walks by, the lights come on and an alarm blares on the base station and a notification is sent to my phone. So I strategically mounted those solar motion lights to alarm and notify me if anyone enters our courtyard, deck, screen porch or storage building. They work great.

After that, I started looking at other X-sense devices. I tried their combo Smoke/CO2 detectors that all go off at the same time and all announce by voice whether smoke or CO2 was detected and which detector was what triggered the alarm. I liked those and bought more plus a couple of heat detectors for the garage. Also, the app allows you to create a test fire drill. You just pick the device that will detect smoke or CO2 and at what time you want to start the drill.

I just kept expanding. Now we have water leak detectors, security system door/window alarms and motion detectors. They all have a lot of customization. Take the security system for instance. I have added three keypads to control the system, plus I can control it with either of our phones. For the 3 security system control buttons on the keypad, I can pick and choose what devices are armed or unarmed on each setting, phone and base station alarms, notifications tone, sound volume, etc. I didn't want a security service and I wanted a system I could easily install myself. This system has a lot more control settings than the wired security system at our last house.

I just added temperature/humidity detectors this week. We have three portable dehumidifiers in the basement and they don't always cut on or off automatically. So I set a low and high humidity and temperature notification on the detectors for them and now we can check their status easily on our phones, plus get notifications to our phones if the humidity is too high or low indicating the dehumidifiers need to be turned on or off. I also have one of these in the attic. If the attic sensor goes off, I can open my garage and attic pulldown and flip a switch to turn on my attic fans to blow a lot of air through the attic ridge vents and monitor how fast the attic cools down.

So I am very impressed with the X-sense system. It can add up to six base stations with up to 50 devices each. This allows you to put a base Station in your bedroom for any device alarms that you want to wake you up, like security system alarms or water leaks. The smoke detector base station can be in another room because the smoke detectors all across the house go off. Base stations for temperature/humidity and for the mailbox and garbage can be in other rooms, each with their own unique alarm tones so that when any type alarm goes off, you know what it is.

All of the devices have low battery notifications that you can get from the phone app plus you can see the battery level indicator and signal level on the majority of the devices (all except the mailbox detectors). The batteries are all replaceable AA, AAA or CR123 batteries and they last between 3 to 10 years depending on the device. Also every device can be remotely tested from your phone.

Perhaps other systems are better. I wouldn't know. However, the X-sense system is great for what we need and is easy to install, add devices, and is highly customizable.

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What switches are you using for this?

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3rd reality zigbee rocker switches

I like these for the vent fans because they are easy to add to any switch (that you don’t need instant on).

I use the Sonof relays behind the switch for lights with motion/contact sensors that I want to turn on instantly.

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Ended up having to send the Rachio 3 back. It doesn't take a hardwired 24VAC input and I dont have a receptacle at the controller location. Plus, I didn't realize there were no manual controls at the controller and you have to use the app. I'll be getting a Hunter X2-600 WAND instead.

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the curse of CAD. anytime i like a product it immediately turns to shite for the next buyer.

eta technically it does have a circle button you can use to do various tasks; but not intuitive without a screen or the app.