Re: Comfort vs Ordinary alarms [was RE: Lots of Thank-You's...]

["PatrickLidstone" <patrickl@xxxxxxx>]

--- In ukha_d@y..., "Mark Hetherington" <mark.egroups@m...>
wrote:
> Mark McCall wrote:
> 
> > Thanks to Steve Gordon for his Comfort demonstration and 
> > the interesting debate that followed.  The Comfort vs 
> > "ordinary" alarm and HV debate will rage on.
> 
> Might be interesting to see some of what was said.
> 

In my previous house I had a conventional alarm panel, which I also 
interfaced to a PC using a parallel port for occupancy detection. In 
my current house I have a Comfort system. I don't think I would fit 
one again, now that the market has matured a bit.

Consensus seems to be that security is best handled by a stand alone 
device in the interests of reliability. As others pointed out at the 
meet, errors in reprogramming comfort can have dire consequences 
(e.g. missed alarms, false alarms).

There are aspects of security which interlink with HA. Occupancy 
detection, knowing whether an alarm has been triggered, setting back 
heating controls when the system is armed and so on. If the panel can 
communitcate status changes then these functions can be handled very 
flexibly with Homeseer, Homevision, Mister House and so on. 

Several existing panels, including comfort, have the ability to 
generate X10 events. In the past I have used this to integrate the 
panel with other HA systems but it is too slow for some applications -
such as turning a light on when you come into the room. Hence the 
preference for hardwired solutions. However, there are many panels 
out there capable of generating serial or parallel event logs - the 
serial interface is not something unique to comfort.

I personally don't have a problem with programming comfort, coming 
>from
unfriendly. The new Configurator software is supposed to address some 
of these issues, but it apparently too buggy to be of use at this 
time.

Now that wireless LANs and web tablets are widely available, the 
convenience of the home control through voice menus access from the 
local telephone extensions which Comfort offers seems cumbersome in 
the extreme. If I require remote voice control (I don't, I use text 
messaging), then a voice capable modem and TAPI could be used to 
provide this functionality - and could potentially provide greater 
felxibility (e.g. ability to read out mail messages, weather reports 
and so on which Comfort cannot do).

I guess the bottom line for me is: If I were doing this again, I 
would opt for a standard panel with a serial event log interface, 
connected to a dedicated HA PC or possibly Home Vision. (In fact, 
this is effectively how I now use Comfort). All the non-security 
related functions present in Comfort can be replicated using off-the 
shelf software on a dedicated PC, and the dedicated PC offers greater 
flexibility, and ease of maintance, for less than the cost of the 
Comfort box. In my experience reliability of a PC based system is not 
an issue - although I know others have been less fortunate.

In Comforts defence - for people who do not have a dedicated PC, or 
who have relatively simple HA needs (as opposed to our die hard, 
bleeding edge HA requirements) which are not constantly evolving and 
changing, such as my parents, Comfort does a good job in this niche. 

Patrick

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