The first was received as a gift from my wife that she chose because of its “works with home assistant” branding… It did not which we didn’t discover until after installing it… She had gotten then wifi one not knowing the difference…
Returned for lock 2 the Z-Wave version… which seemed to work well for all of a month until I the finger printer scanner stopped working completely. After jumping through a bunch of hoops, that was warrenty returned for lock number 3…
This time again it barely made it a couple months before it started showing damn near every user reported error over the course of a few days… overnight battery drain, hundreds of ghost finger print scans, failing to auto lock, followed by the motor completely dying, meaning only able to lock/unlock manually with a key…
They were really quick to send out lock number 4 and I really wanted this all to be just some weird string of fluke lemons but of course upon installation and set up, I come to discover it has a major z-wave issue… unlike the previous bad units, this one will not pair with my hub no matter what I do. First the QR code is bad, it throws an error every time I try to scan it so I used another app to decode but the text just throws an error about an invalid checksum. Every attempt at network discovery scans just timeout.
I’ve tried every inclusion, exclusion, removing failed devices, factory resets on both the lock and z-wave hub. Everything multiple times now and nothing will work. It’s connected to the network bridge just fine, wifi and Bluetooth work, but z-wave will not.
And seeing as the only home assistant integration available is the z-wave one, I cannot integrate the lock into my home ecosystem. I managed to try the smart things work around via Wi-Fi and while that does expose a very basic lock/unlock switch to H.A. it never actually updates after a door is locked and exposes no sensor data, user-code data or any other relevant information one comes to expect from a z-wave device (if you can even call this one.
I really gave utec a chance, but this is the literally definition of insanity. I haven’t even reached out to support about these latest z-wave issues with this last one they sent me as, let’s be real, what’s the point… wait a week for them to send a 5th piece of crap that might give me a month or two of use before it shits the bed too.. nah I’m good. This crap will be here until I have the time/money to install a new one from a different brand. I see Yale has a nice z-wave option and to be frank, after skimming their community forums, has far far far less issues than any utec product as you can read here.
What a waste of time and money. If you’re lucky enough to find this thread before a purchased from them… Be warned. My experience isn’t unique, there’s hundreds, if not thousands of posts similar to each of my issues. I’m just the idiot who hung around long enough to experience all of them… well don’t be me.