Ecolink Garage Door Tilt Sensor

Update: Downgraded from 2 stars to 1 star, and changed title of review. It's been a little over 6 months since I bought the Ecolink Tilt Sensor and put it into service. Unfortunately, it became less and less reliable over time, with more and more false positives. At this point, when it says "hey the garage door is open!", now about 50% of the time the garage door turns out NOT to be open. This makes it worthless, because as you'd expect, nobody pays attention to the alerts anymore. Several other reviewers had mentioned this thing becoming less reliable over time, but as frustrated as I was with the 97% original accuracy, even I didn't expect it to descend to 50% within 6 months. (As mentioned in the earlier review, it started out not completely accurate, but still usable, at 97%.) In case there is suspicion that maybe I'm using this thing in Point Barrow on an industrial door, I'm not. I had very garden variety usage and expectations here-- our garage door opens maybe 2-3 times a day and I'm in a relatively temperate and dry place-- and it's mounted inside-- so this thing had every opportunity to work fine. I rarely feel compelled to write negative reviews, but, man, this sensor was a terrible disappointment. I'm replacing it with a SmartThings Multi sensor which I hope will do better, and this thing is going in the recycle bin. Original review: <<Too unreliable for security usage. Like asking "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" to watch your door.>> I bought this to use with our SmartThings system, and detect garage door open-ness. On the plus side, it did integrate easily with SmartThings. It was easy to install. The indicator light showing what state it's in, works. It makes a nice, soft, decorous "click" noise when it changes state. The design is appealing-- something about it made me just plain want to like it immediately. Also on the plus side, about 97% of the time it accurately reports whether it is in the closed state or open state. The down side is, I can only say "97% of the time". And that other 3% of the time is a huge problem. Since I added this sensor to our system, it's happened about twice a month that the sensor has reported the door wasn't closed, leading to panic. But sure enough, it turned out every time that the door was closed, contrary to what the sensor said. I feel at first like a bit of a whiner complaining-- after all 97% is an A in school, right? But there are some applications where 97% just isn't good enough. For instance, imagine a brand of car brakes or tires operated correctly 97% of the time, but a mere 3% of the times you were driving to work they would fail. Or imagine a Pasteurizing machine in use at a juice factory, that 97% of the time, successfully killed all the germs in the juice but maybe 3% of the time there was a small chance there would be botulism contamination. Obviously, nobody would buy either of these. Similarly, a sensor that is used in a security setting really needs to be bulletproof. 97% just doesn't cut it. The problem with regularly occurring false positives, is it becomes like "The Boy Who Cried Wolf". So far, every time this sensor has warned that the sky was falling, it turned out to be malarkey, and this happens often enough that nobody pays attention to the alerts anymore. Now, I should say one plus on this front-- I don't believe I've had a false negative with this sensor yet-- only false positives. I'd certainly rather the sensor erred on the side of telling me the door was open when it isn't, than the opposite, not bothering to tell me if it is open when it really is. But I have a sinking feeling maybe the only reason I haven't had a false negative yet is that there isn't much chance for it to occur, and that eventually it should happen. I had read somewhere that there were some questions about this sensor's reliability, but I am surprised to find it to be true, since it's a mechanical sensor which I would ordinarily associate with being reliable. In fact, my rate of false positives is about what I've read other people experience with this sensor. I guess I should have known what to expect based on the reviews I'd read... but this is widely the most suggested dedicated garage door sensor to use with SmartThings. All I can guess is the mechanism inside is either not well made, or not a good design in the first place. Or maybe I'm missing something-- maybe all garage door sensors are widely known to be notoriously unreliable or something like that. But it's difficult for me to imagine how anyone could use them if they were all as unreliable as this one. It's difficult for me to come up with an application I'd recommend this sensor for. Maybe controlling the garage lights-- like "turn off the garage lights when I leave"-- or "turn down the thermostat when I leave" or "turn on the stairway light when I arrive". Something where, if it fails to do it 3% of the time it wouldn't be a problem. PS, on a side note, it's worth pointing out that this isn't a true "tilt" sensor-- it isn't measuring "tilt". It's measuring whether the sensor is in a vertical or horizontal state, but it has no awareness of any gradation between those. For instance it can't determine "I'm tilted, but only at 45 degrees". In itself, this isn't a deal breaker-- if the sensor were more reliable that'd be good enough for garage door open-ness detection. Of course, since it can't even detect "open" vs "closed" reliably, it isn't.