Savant

It took me over 2 years to choose between Control 4, Crestron Home & Savant. I had a strong preference to the Savant user interface over the others, but I read reviews that scared me. After tons of research and now living with it for 3 months, I can say this is an incredibly functional and reliable system and is very sleek. Load times are milliseconds. One feature I wish they would enable is after I select a scene, say “watch movie” would be jumping to the device control page. I still have to navigate through all the button presses to start the movie. It kind of nullifies the scene command. Yes it dims the lights and closes the shades, but that’s just two buttons away in the device controls. There’s also only time based scene control. It sure would be nice to have weather or system feedback conditions. I.e. if I’m watching TV outside and it’s past sunset, set patio lights to x%. If the weather drops below 60 degrees, turn on the patio heaters etc. Your only option now is to set those lights on at sunset by day of week, whether you’re outside or not. Just a bit more intelligence would be icing on the cake.

The app is functional and invaluable for controlling various aspects of my home locally and remotely. Things like pool and home temperature, alarm system, lights, shades, and viewing security cameras. There are quirks. For example there are many times when I launch the app and there are no controls available at all. It will just say “Home”. I’ll have to force quit the app and re-launch to fix it—sometimes more than once. Also, there’s a ton of unrealized potential here. I’m a big user of Scenes and if those were made available to the Apple Shortcuts app Scenes could be triggered by an almost infinite number of things like location, text messages, movement, etc. Right now Scenes can only be triggered by the Savant app itself using times of day. Also, there’s immense potential of home monitoring convenience in iOS 14 if Savant adopted Apple’s new widget architecture. Would love to see these features soon.

I couldn’t be more disappointed with a product than my Savant system. The only thing it does consistently well is control the volume to my Bluesound player that drives my main high end speaker system. Other than that the only thing I would use it for is to play Tidal integrated into the system throughout other speakers in the house but that almost never, ever works. The local dealer, installer won’t ever return my calls or emails for a year now. Well, he did once and said he would get back to me but that hasn’t happened. Given this experience, I would not recommend this system and will research other systems to replace it.