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I dipped my toe in the home automation waters a couple years back with a wifi enabled set of garage door openers. I'm the guy that leaves for a trip and immediately has to drive around the block to go past my house one more time to convince myself that yes, I did close the garage doors. I liked being able to see a simple Open/Closed status on my smart phone and could also open the door from my phone when I pulled up on my motorcycle. Because we live on a busy urban street I've never wanted to install a garage door keypad on the outside. So all in all it seemed like a great solution and it was, for about a year. Then it started to fail. The false "your garage door just opened" text alerts started showing up. Mostly in the morning and the early evening. Tons of them. Like even 7 minutes. Took me a couple weeks to spot the pattern. Every time a city bus drive by, up popped the alert. Then one evening I'm sitting on the sofa and I hear the garage door open. "Ah, the wife is home". Strangely it doesnt close and she doesnt come upstairs. I wander down to the garage and nope, she's not home. Worst of all the stupid system that's pinging me every 7 minutes with false alerts, never sent an alert. The final straw was coming home from work and finding one of the garage doors wide open. I ripped that shit out and tossed it in the trash.
I want to see all this stuff move a bit further along in the development cycle before I trust it again.
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