Keeping it secure (part 2) - Locking my doors & Doorbells.

<Update 6th Feb 2021>

One of the first things I tried to implement, with varying degrees of success.

If only August were, well, august!

in 2017 I bought into August door locks.,, mainly because they had a doorbell, which was going to have HomeKit compatability.

The Door locks, at the time, were bluetooth only and huge in size on the back of the door. What I did like about them, though, was that the motor was relatively powerful, which is important in an old house where things have moved over the decades and doors don't fit perfectly any more. With August you also kept a large chunk of your original door hardware... at the front at least.

However, that bluetooth was a pain. To be fair to August, they then came up with the August connect that enabled connection via WiFi and the front door lock also got WiFi connectivity via the doorbell. This being the most important one.

Too big for its boots! Enter Fridays Labs, now Friday Home

The size of the August lock meant I couldn't use it on my French Doors on to the deck, and so for that I bought a Friday Lock. Two things I liked about the Friday Lock were:

• it was much smaller and 
• the battery, which is quite chunky, is rechargeable.
• It supports WiFi

This lock has been on my FrenchDoors for about 3 years now and hasn't caused a problem. I think I've charged it 3 times in that entire period.

However, I'm in the process of selling my house and I realise that the way I had done things, that being registering every devices that needed an account against my personal e-mail, is not that brilliant! So, I have to move the lock ownership to a different account and, as it happens, to a new "home". 

I spent hours trying to get this to work.

I'd get varying degrees of success, and the most common point I'd get to was that the app would try and contact a server (Why I need a server for my door lock I do not know), and then finally fail. It would be visible in HomeKit, but would then say that "setup was needed" and I could not do any set up at all.

I logged a call... which you can only do via e-mail.

I carried on, and had found it strange that I could not find a reset button. I kept looking and, finally, found a reference in an online article to a reset button... just not where it was. I kept looking more, and finally found a reset procedure on the Friday web site.

This was the magic bullet.

I had to follow the procedure exactly, including the reboot... so I'm guessing there is some holding of information in cache.... and the lock finally added perfectly! So annoying that it kept appearing before and it was some syncing issue with their server. The error not even suggesting a reset and actually saw dto contact support.

If you are wondering, it has many of the same features as August....except, again, it works over WiFi!

More troubles with August.....

My issues with the August locks just got worse. 

I found the connect was a bit unreliable and I could never get my partner to be able to access the doors through HomeKit. Worked fine for me, but not her. I tried through August Technical Support, and no good at all! Now, I've heard some people talk about being perfectly happy to use the August app.... and if that suits them, you go for it! For me? What is the point of having a home automation platform where you have to go to another app?

Another huge issue was that I found that 3 August locks burnt through batteries (4 Duracell AA's for each lock) at an alarming rate! I should've bought shares in Duracell!

Then there was the Doorbell. August never ever supported HomeKit. It just dropped from their promises. No explanation, nothing! That taught me a big lesson, which is never rely on promises from a manufacturer. Even worse, they wouldn't release their API so it was virtually impossible to do an integration via homebridge.... although I finally managed it after 2 years of messing around, to a certain extent: I did get the camera to stream, and the snapshot to work. I could never get the doorbell button to register or the motion detector. My work around for the motion detector was to put a Koogeek motion detector out there.

Lastly, August wants to sell you a service for the Doorbell. So there is no local storage. At all! A cost every month.

I want to be totally fair to August here. Their mechanism on the back of the door is now much smaller than it was and it uses WiFi natively ... except for HomeKit which still uses Bluetooth! The lock is still very noticeable and it's still the same application, so I'm guessing still a major pain in the arse to integrate into HomeKit for multiple users.

After my less than stellar experience, I was on the lookout for a new set of locks and a doorbell.

Introducing the Level Bolt..... and out with the August!

As I was looking around, a company called Level came along and released their new lock, now called the Level Bolt. This completely hides inside the door. On the outside, it just looks like a standard lock. The battery, which isn't rechargeable as delivered, actually lives inside the bolt itself. It is completely invisible, which goes towards my ethos of invisible is best. So far, I haven't had any issues with the locks being unreachable and the battery life is extremely good. 

I've had them installed for months now, and have not had to replace batteries at all. I do think the motor is a little weaker than August but, I found, a little judicious modification of the striking plate location solves that.

Not my handy work on the door! Still shows how unobtrusive Level bolt is.

So, if I like Level so much, why haven't I changed them all? Call me paranoid.... but I like a multivendor approach to my door locks. Just incase something goes wrong, I can still get in!

I've seen some people say that they preferred August because it lets you auto unlock the door. This is a reaction to Apple not doing that without a confirmation. Personally, I'm with Apple here as if you lose your phone, do you really want some stranger getting access to your home?

Still, recently (Dec 2020) Level have obviously been listening as I noticed two new options have appeared which are "Auto Unlock" and "Auto Lock".

Replacing the August Doorbell with the Netatmo Smart Doorbell

As I mentioned before, I started with an August Doorbell for which they promised, and never delivered, HomeKit support.

CES 2019, Netatmo announced Smart Doorbells for HomeKit (They can also do Alexa) and, in the middle of 2020 they started asking for ambassadors. I applied, and got one as part of that scheme. You get 30% off as part of the scheme. As part of the NDA, I'm not allowed to discuss the beta. but it generally ran pretty smoothly and I was happy to have a doorbell that properly integrated into HomeKit.

Because I was running beta on iOS/iPad/tvOS/AudioOS 14 I got to play with all the toys.... or almost.

I get the chime on selected HomePods, which is damn useful when I'm in the garage, and Picture in Picture (PiP) on my tv for when I'm being a couch potato. 

What they haven't delivered is HomeKit Secure Video (HKSV or HSV), which is a shame. They have promised it, and they have delivered on their indoors camera, so I have reasonable confidence that they will deliver.

[edit] They have now delivered dropbox support, and continually deliver new firmware updates, so I feel confident that HKSV will come.

So, what the difference between using the Doorbell without HKSV? Not too much.

I still get :

• the ability to store locally (on a 32GB SD card)
• tv PiP
• HomePod chime
• Activity zones. In this case inside the Netatmo App. They are rectangles though. HKSV enables you to have multiple irregular shapes
• Ability to store data in the cloud, just not iCloud.
• Integration with HomeKit
• Motion sensor exposed in HomeKit.

What I'll get with HKSV:

• Multiple irregular activity zones from inside HomeKit
• Ability for HomeKit to recognise the person ringing the bell
• Store data in iCloud

Defining an activity zone inside the Netatmo Security App

Training the Doorbell

Netatmo have put the intelligence in the doorbell. During beta there were some upgrades to that intelligence so I don't know if my experience is accurate, but I did have to train it. I actually didn't know you could do it, and it is also true of their outdoor camera too. Work in this area increased the reliability of the cameras massively.

Installation

On the whole, installation was fairly easy. The biggest issue being the old wiring and not much of it left. The other issue I had is that the back plates are designed for a flat surface. I live in an old house and I have carved door frames and so it doesn't sit so well. I do think Netatmo need to take this into consideration. Some people during the beta used foam backs to help with similar issues.

The Netatmo Doorbell inside HomeKit

I have it as a favourite inside HomeKit, along with my other cameras, mostly Netatmo. It presents as a vertical snapshot and video when you open it.

Here you can see that I can do PiP, adjust volume and talk with someone outside. 

In the bottom right hand corner, if you click on that you will see other HomeKit accessories that would be associated with the Doorbell.

My front door lock, if I wanted to allow anyone in. The Porch light if I want to illuminate the scene more, possibly at night, although the nighttime vision is pretty good. Lastly, my alarm system, so I can turn it off before unlocking the door.

In settings:

You assign it to a room and you set up notifications as well as there being some suggested automations, or ones you have selected. The accessory is the motion detector which, I must admit, seems quite slow when using for automations.

Pay attention to the the notifications, as you can also set up notifications inside the Netatmo Security app, which means you could get swamped by notifications if you aren't careful.

HomePod Chime

When you look in notifications you can see that you can Chime on the HomePod. I have all my HomePods selected at the moment. You do have to be running HomePod OS 14.1 at a minimum. 

Picture in Picture on tv

It's kind of nice, and might be great if your TV viewing room is well away from the front door. In my case, the living room is right next to the front door. Still, means I can avoid answering the door to those I don't want to talk to!

It actually appears fairly quickly. If you are wondering what you can see, it's the fly screen door :-D

Speed of response

This varies dramatically between iPhones/iPads.

[Edit]

I had an iPhone 7+ which generally is still just fine, but I find I get about a 3.5s to 4s delay. 

My partner has an iPhone 10, and it's about 2s quicker to get notifications. 

My brand new iPhone 12 is almost immediate. I'd say less than 1 second. 

So, obviously your actual iPhone is going to make a huge difference in response time to this. This brief Video was taken on my iPhone 12.

Cost of Netatmo Doorbell

There's one thing I really want to cover. The cost. It is expected the US price will be US$299 for the doorbell. A number of people have said that this is expensive. However, when you compare to the competition correctly, it isn't. E.g. The Ring:

• Doorbell (Closest in functionality): $249
• 1 year of subscription: low end service is $60, high end is $120
• That means end of:
• year 1: $309 or $369
• year 2: $369 or $429
• year 3: $429 or $489
• year 4: $489 or $549
• year 5: $549 or $609

$299 doesn't look so expensive now, does it?

Automations.

Not a great deal here. Basically, I lock all the doors and turn on the security system when we leave the house. I have a scene to do that, but also have set up the geolocation just in case we forget to lock a particular door.

I almost did something really dumb, which was I thought it'd be a good idea that if the front door was closed, and no-one was in the vestibule, then lock all the doors and alarm the house.... until I realised that you could do that just because you go outside to chat to a neighbour and you don't have your keys, phone or watch to get back in! You can make your house too smart! It reminds me of my golden rule with regard to software... always assume that people will do dumb stuff!

I have, however, also set up an automation with the motion sensor in the Doorbell. At night, when motion is detected, then the porch light will come on. This is the automation referenced in the Doorbell settings. It actually came up as a recommendation, except that I added the timing based condition and that it turns off after 5 minutes.