I’ve had the lock for over a year, and in general I’m happy with it but…
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Despite saying they were going to implement more Z-Wave functionality, the lock only reports if it is locked or not. The sensor doesn’t report anything. So if you leave the door open you won’t know. I saw posts in the Hubitat forum that said they got a separate door sensor, so that is a workaround, but still disappointing to have to resort to that. (Just FYI, I had the Hubitat C-7 hub and now have their C-8 hub).
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I have it set to auto-lock instantly and myself and my family (wife and adult daughter) really like it. I live in a condo and the door to the elevator is right outside my unit. We had tried a delay, like 10-15 seconds (thinking we might want to go right back in if we forgot something) but then we didn’t hear it lock as we were already outside of that door to the elevator. So, at least for us, a zero time was right, but it is adjustable.
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The auto-unlock is very hit and miss. I get why some people wouldn’t want to turn this on, but we like it. When it works, it’s great, especially if I have my hands full. I approach the door and it unlocks. Brilliant! (As our friends across the pond would say). But so many times it doesn’t unlock at all, or it is so slow to do so we give up waiting and use our fingerprint.
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The fingerprint reader started off great, but certainly doesn’t seem to have learned and gotten better over time as it said it would. If anything, it’s gotten worse. It seems way over particular about exactly how you place your finger/thumb on the button (even though I tried to move my thumb around a bit during the pairing process). For some reason, it works better for some people than others, despite me having myself and them re-record our prints more than once and trying to keep the button clean, etc. But, all-in-all it does work. That said, I had iPhones with the fingerprint button, and I still have an iPad with the fingerprint button, and they work vastly more consistently and reliably than the Ultraloq, and I can’t remember ever cleaning those buttons. So either the sensor isn’t very good or the software isn’t, or both. So that is a bit frustrating.
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Auto-mystery-unlock. Many times after we’ve come in and locked the door it unlocks itself. Obviously, this can be very bad. We do have it set that if it is unlocked and not opened in 30 seconds it re-locks itself, so we’ve learned to just ignore it and wait for it to re-lock itself. I have 2 main guesses for that: the main one is that the auto-unlock doesn’t know to turn itself off when we got tired of waiting for it and used one of the other methods to unlock it. My second guess is that since all 3 of us have auto-unlock on, when 2 or more of us arrive home at the same time they all don’t know one of us has unlocked the door. But either way, that is something that should be addressed in the software and just hasn’t in over a year.
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You can have multiple people have the app. For some reason, as I said above, the fingerprint reader works better for some than others. My wife has a terrible time with the fingerprint reader, so she uses the app most of the time. I tried that too, but it does take a while for it to be ready to use even though I always keep it open on my iPhone (which they suggested to help with the auto-unlock). So the times it just didn’t want to read my fingerprint I used the code. (So one nice thing is the multiple ways to get in: fingerprint, code, app, or key).
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Spare keys. I went to Home Depot, Lowes and Ace to get an extra key made. When I did it didn’t work. They can’t quite figure out why and U-Tec support was unable to tell me which blank to use! (Which seems insane) and U-Tec doesn’t sell spare keys. So I’m very unhappy that there are only 2 keys for the 3 of us.
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Use with Hubitat. Since it only reports if it is locked or not, and I have auto-lock turned on, I’ve literally not done a single automation with it an Hubitat.
So, the bottom line is : would I get it again? I’m not sure as I haven’t any lock shopping in over a year. I had the Shepard lock and it was terrible. This is much better than that, and I would say it is better than just a traditional key.