Quote:
Originally Posted by annasuave
Does it help to know the Mrs. is a tech junkie who can't understand why modern homes don't come with stuff like Echo or Google Home pre-installed? Who wants to turn on light switches with their hands like a sucker, when you could just tell the house to turn them on?
Would your recommendations for home security change if you knew Rico had to contend with a strong geek factor? At the very least, I want to be able to see who's ringing my doorbell on my smartphone.
|
Haha - I thought Rico was the geek of the family. Vivint's ranks high on the tech factor with a great app, doorbell camera that goes to the panel, Nest, electronic locks, and a whole bunch of other stuff (though I don't think it does Google Home / Echo). Much better integrated than some of the major systems out there. It's a wireless system like ADT's Pulse which has it's negatives - signals are terrible in my house so I have repeaters for Z-wave and wifi.
Many of the negatives others have mentioned about them are valid. I suspect trying to cancel mid contract would be a nightmare and costly. They do run door to door teams which is pretty scuzzy. What I've read is to do avoid these sales teams and some of their summer seasonal installers as they are really just temp employees. Support is all done out of Utah but they will dispatch a service guy locally if they have to. If you're handy, they'll even just courier you a new device and you install it (ie deadbolt) and they can activate over the phone.
At the end of the day, a monitored fire/flood/freeze sensor reduced my Home insurance by $20 / month which made the costs of an alarm system more manageable.