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2013-11-10
3/5
"EDIT: After posting this negative review (below) I was contacted by Joe Thomas at Safemart to help me resolve the trouble I was having. Due to the variety of things that went wrong with the hardware I had it was clear that the problems I encountered went way beyond my ability to solve. With great effort on both of our parts, Joe was ultimately able to help me get my system working again and I am very grateful for the solid hour he spent on the phone with me (on his personal cel phone after hours) to get my system working again. I owe him a debt of gratitude.
I did explain to Joe that Safemart could improve their customers situation greatly by including better documentation with their systems. One cannot simply ignore the massive headaches they have had to endure while installing and configuring a wireless security system. That being said, had I knew who to call prior to starting this project my experience could have been avoided. I guess the important factor for a Safemart buyer to consider is make sure you get the after hours number for help before signing up. With the proper customer support base there is no reason you should have problems with this company.
I ammended my review and bumped Safemart up because of the extra help.
-----Original Review-----
I have been a Safemart customer since Feb 13. The initial phone support was ok and the basic system setup was pretty easy, however, I quickly realized as you add features to your system knowledgeable customer support becomes scarce.
Part of the allure of a Safemart system are the extra features you can buy into. Through a third party website, alarm.com, users can manage their system remotely. It sounds good in theory, but what they fail to tell you, and what I learned the hard way, is that they have no control over anything you depend on for the system to work. The equipment they sell you, the company that monitors your alarm, and the alarm.com website are all separate entities, they are just middlemen. When you have real trouble with your system after hours (which I did frequently) you'll have to wait until business hours to get trouble sorted.
Though I could go on about the many issues I discovered with their service, (once it was installed but too late to return) for brevity I'll just mention two.
The first problem we had were sensors sending false data to the alarm.com website. On several occasions when we were out of town the website had indicated that doors were open which prompted an investigation on one occasion, and a police squad entering the property with guns drawn on the other. After struggling with this problem for a few months, Alarm.com blamed the equipment that Safemart sold us and Safemart blamed alarm.com's "latency period" with the website. Neither were very helpful responses.
Another area of frustration, and a massive expense, were the camera's. Safemart sells some prepackaged camera's that work with the website, but not well. The resolution is ok, and they are highly configurable, but depending on the light and how much motion the camera is picking up (i.e. wind, shadows, trees, birds, etc), you'll end up having to turn off the motion detection anyways because you'll get too many false alarms. False alarms = a big bill at the end of the month for web traffic.
Also, the cameras technically work over Wi-fi but to get them working is nothing short of a massive effort, plus you still need to hire a licensed electrician to pull power to them since POE is not available. You need to know (and this is not disclosed in the literature) that you have to connect the camera to your router prior to installation. Once they're installed you'll need to drag a super long Cat5 cable to the camera, climb up to it, and repeatedly reset the camera until the website finds it over your router with their EZ Install Wizard (that is not). Expect to spend about an hour per camera and multiple reset efforts before you actually get the camera to work with the website, if you can get it to work at all."
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