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I don't care what the panel makers say, keypads still beat phone apps for arming
Last Tuesday I was finishing a panel swap in a house out in Mesa and the homeowner asked me to skip the keypad by the garage door because she arms everything from her phone now. I did it her way, and three days later her wifi dropped while she was at work and she couldn't arm the system at all, so I drove back out and put the keypad in anyway. I get why people like the app, but a keypad works when the router dies, when the power blips, and when the internet company has one of its bad afternoons. Call me old school but I'm not putting a client's whole security setup on a cloud connection I can't see. Has anyone found a backup setup that actually holds up when the network goes down?
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oliviac221d ago
Same thing happened on a job I did last summer. Client swore up and down she only used the app, so we left the keypad off the wall and she was happy for about two weeks. Then her kid unplugged the router to charge a tablet and the whole panel went dumb, no arm, no disarm, nothing. She called me at 9pm in a panic because the alarm was stuck armed and she couldn't get in without tripping it. After that I started running a keypad on every install no matter what the customer says, plus I set the panel to stay on cell as the main path and wifi as backup so the app still works but the network dropping doesn't kill anything. Costs a little more but I sleep better.
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