Joe The Fixer
Standard Member
Ten years ago, on a cold dark night,.. oh wait that's a Johnny Cash song,.. we bought a new home in a great neighborhood. It was touted as a smart home. It wasn't really, but for 2007, it was probably mid grade. It had a Russound keypad audio system and HAI lights that were supposed to come on automatically, a security system, a media server and a few other things including a tall A/V rack in the basement. I guess for 2007, it was fairly tech wise. But after the first few years, everything started going haywire. So, I called in an expert, highly recommended, he convinced me that I needed to abandon the Russound system because it was bad from the beginning and put in this new Control 4 system. I took his advice and paid him a few thousands of dollars ($15k if I recall), but it never functioned as he had convinced me it would. I called him back and he said my internet signal was weak, so I put in a new router that he recommended, that helped but it was still not totally stable. Often, in the middle of a TV show, I couldn't get the remote to work. So he came back and put in some little repeater antennas. That helped too, but still flaky problems would suddenly appear and sometimes disappear. It wasn't fun. My technician moved on to more profitable jobs and became less customer service oriented, so I called in another highly recommended A/V guy. He said the first guy didn't know what he was doing, that he had programmed things wrong. But sadly, the same scenario repeated itself. A third company was called in, they too, like the 2nd guy, claimed they fixed all the C4 installs by "the other guys" because they were the best and I should have used them first. But alas, the problems persisted as I spent more money. I did a lot of homework and called in a 4th specialist, he recommended that I rip out the C4, write it off as a learning experience and move on to Savant because Savant, he said, was stable. Another $9,000. Well, he was right, the Savant system has worked beautifully without an issue for about 5 years now. Apples to apples, it was the more expensive option but at least it worked for those who had the Savant app downloaded to their phone, and were willing to climb the learning curve. But for a visitor to our home, it wasn't friendly. Now what to do with all those Russound keypads built into the walls all over my house? To be continued
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