Earlier this year, I finally broke down and purchased a Samsung SmartThings home automation hub. I had wanted to get one for about two years after hearing about them advertised on the TWiT network. I did wait a bit until I had a bit of spare cash and for the SmartThings 2.0 hub to come out. The big draw for the 2.0 was some limited local network-only remote control.
Anyway, it started with just a Z-wave front door lock and has begun to spread. I now have several receptacle and smart appliance switches, garage door opener, door sensor and a number of Aeotec water sensors.
In fact, those just saved me today when we had a small water problem in the basement. Somehow the hot water was left on and that caused a poorly installed trap to slip just enough to let water start leaking onto the floor.
When I bought the sensors originally, that was the very first place I intended to put one because this has happened to me before. The sink is a pedestal sink which makes it hard to get access to the trap in case of a leak. Well, when it happened before it took me a while to catch it and I’ve been a bit paranoid about it happening again since.
Well, this time the sensor saved me. The app first indicated a water problem in the basement at 1:34pm. By 1:45ish, I’d fixed the problem and cleaned up the mess.
Oh and thanks for the assist goes to Pushbullet. I’ve been using it for a number of years to handle notification mirroring from my Android phones to Chrome on my PCs. In this case, the notification popped up on my laptop while I was doing something else, so I was able to immediately react. For lack of that, I may not have caught it until a bit later. Come to think of it, I may want to update the action on the water problems to include an email …
