Your home should always feel safe and comfortable, particularly at this time of year. With a stash of presents that would out Santa to shame, you need to feel happy leaving you home, knowing that it’s protected to the best of your ability.
That’s where the Panasonic Home Safety Starter kit comes in, it’s designed to help reassure you and protect your home when you’re not there. It’s a subscription free home alarm system that sends alerts to a users smart phone if the motion sensor is triggered.
The kit is surprisingly simple to set up. The kit I was sent contains one Smart Home hub, one window/door sensor and one motion detector. The parts are all relative small, meaning they’re quite easily hidden or disguised within your home. I like the simple design, they’re not over complicated to look at there isn’t a multitude of buttons.
To get started you need to download the Panasonic Home Networking App to your Apple or Android phone. I quickly and easily downloaded it to my Iphone but it can be downloaded to numerous items which is handy if you’re a multi phone household.
Once the app is installed on your phone you can turn on the alarm, disarm it and monitor any activity in your home, it’s extremely clever, though I’ll admit I probably watch it a little too much when I’m out of the house, possibly bordering on obsessively.
Setting up the kit is pretty easy and the manual is very simple to follow. Open up the app on your phone and follow through the on screen steps. You need to pair your device with the hub to enable it to work, once that’s done it will automatically picks up the sensor and connects to them. The sensors can be drilled into walls or door frames, depending on your choice of set up, but they can also be used free standing.
The hub activates the sensors which trigger when a door or window is opened and the room sensor tracks any movement withing the room it’s placed. We placed ours in the porch, as we thought it would be the likeliest access route into the property by naughty burglars.
The alarm has three modes :- armed at home, armed when out and fully disarmed. The mode we’ve mainly used is armed when out, which has offered reassurance but has thankfully never activated either.
If a sensor goes off then the person with the app on their phone will receive a text message. If your phone is on silent or you miss the text, you will miss the notification. I can’t help but feel, a further activation or call of some sort would also be handy.
We’ve been using the basic starter kit but there are various additions you can purchase, including extra door sensor and video camera’s. I like that it can be tailored to your own needs and budget.
I do like the kit, it’s not like anything I’ve used before so initially I wasn’t too sure. As it’s very simple to set up, easy to use and works well, I’d be happy to keep using it. The kit is much cheaper than having a home alarm installed but at £129.99 for the basic kit it’s not a cheap product. Personally, I would be happy to pay that price, knowing I had some reassurance that my home and belongings were safe.
What I liked
- The security reassurance
- The discreet design and simple set up
- There is only one initial cost unless you add extras – no monthly fee’
What I didn’t like
- The starter kit doesn’t come with many sensors. I think ideally we’d need at least another one of each to secure the ground floor of the house.
- The extras will soon inflate the cost
Product sample sent for review
