When you’re not home it becomes part of the alarm system. When you are home it can turn on the lights or heating (or extractor fan in the bathroom) and you can aggregate it with other sensors to measure occupancy to turn those things off again. If you use Home Assistant (or something like it) you can use it to go anything that can be inferred from a door being used.
Peace of mind. We have a light that lights up red when a door is open. At the end of the night we get an announcement “all doors closed” - last night I got an announcement telling me one door was open - I went there and sure enough: the magnet side of the sensor had fallen off, door was closed.
Depends on your level of trust. I trust the sensor to tell me the door is open/closed (which is a concern to know if people are actually coming in or out - can’t do that with the door closed)… I don’t trust a smart lock to always lock or unlock when I want it to, and those are the things that will give you a locked/unlocked status report. If anybody really wants to get in/out of our house it doesn’t matter if the doors are locked or not, they can always break a window.
what’s a door sensor good for?
When you’re not home it becomes part of the alarm system. When you are home it can turn on the lights or heating (or extractor fan in the bathroom) and you can aggregate it with other sensors to measure occupancy to turn those things off again. If you use Home Assistant (or something like it) you can use it to go anything that can be inferred from a door being used.
Peace of mind. We have a light that lights up red when a door is open. At the end of the night we get an announcement “all doors closed” - last night I got an announcement telling me one door was open - I went there and sure enough: the magnet side of the sensor had fallen off, door was closed.
so you use it for security? wouldn’t it make more sense to detect if the locks are locked?
Depends on your level of trust. I trust the sensor to tell me the door is open/closed (which is a concern to know if people are actually coming in or out - can’t do that with the door closed)… I don’t trust a smart lock to always lock or unlock when I want it to, and those are the things that will give you a locked/unlocked status report. If anybody really wants to get in/out of our house it doesn’t matter if the doors are locked or not, they can always break a window.
Sensing doors.