Funny story from yesterday. I am at a friend bar doing some things for him. I noticed him sitting with a guy trying to sell him a home automation system as I’m taking a break to eat. My friend notices I’m finishing and calls me over. He wants me to hear what the guy is selling Out of curiosity I do. He trying to sell my boy 2 4k cameras with sound (wow!), 2 PIR detectors, a touch screen, 3 controllable lights, a thermostat, a smoke detector and police/fire monitoring
I ask him why would he need cameras and motion detection, if the cameras can detect (part of the pitch). They need the sensors for the alarm monitoring. I ask in this situation, that would be redundant. The business is either open or closed, no animals or shade to false trigger cameras. After some banter it broke down to the cameras detection isn’t linked. To which my reply was, then the system is really not smart.
I’ll give this guy credit though he was trying. For instance, they will install the best and latest ethernet cable system using Category 5 cable. I’m like dude, it’s up to 6.
When I got to the bottom of my glass, I was a bit weary of this chap I asked him what is this going to cost. 99 a month, but Im giving a special, cut him off, dont give me all this smoke, what’s the bottom line. 50 something/month for the service and 40 something for the equipment over 60 months. Was about the same 99 he initial wasn’t going to charge. 3k for the equipment and 3k for the service over the life of the contract.
I tell him, you haven’t told me anything that warrants that. He already has basically everything your trying to sell him and he pays nothing for it. Dude goes on to tell me there are added features and the whole system is integrated. Don’t have to worry about this not working with that.
I stop him and ask him, can this system tell me when my next train is coming? He tells me know and that there is no system on the market that he knows of that can do that, but his can give me the weather forecast on their display screen. I chuckle.
All the while Im opening HA on my phone. I show it to him, yeah it’s gonna be this as far as weather and according the radar, some clouds are coming. Oh and my next train would be in what ever time it said. I scrolled through some pages to show him all the other stuff his system can’t do. He said he was a software engineer. I told him I tinker and monitor all my systems from here as I showed him the page with glances for 2 other machines, system and network health monitors. The page with all the climate sensors in the rooms and the pretty graphs. Told him my “thermostat” knows when the house is occupied, by who and acts accordingly. I added that I have a hodgepodge of devices from many different manufacturers and protocols playing happily in the playground together. His face flushed red and said, well our system has 4k cameras and the picture is much better than that and it’s real time. He was referring to the camera live streams in a menu that update every x seconds. To which I replied, bro those are the dumbed down low res for the menus as I clicked the image and the full res real time display came up. By the way, I don’t pay anything per month and the initial outlay probably 1/6 of what you quoted your equipment for this place with is significantly less gear that what I just showed. to boot, your system really isn’t that smart.
He started packing his stuff and left, didn’t even say goodbye.
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