Make Sure the Right Person Hears the Alert When You Can't
Smart alerts only help when someone can act on them.
It's 2 a.m., and the back door at your lake home just opened. Your phone buzzes three hours away, but it's on silent, so no one finds out. Home monitoring in Cass County, MN, is only as good as the person who sees the alert, and tonight that person is asleep.
The opposite problem is just as bad. When every motion, door, and doorbell press goes to everyone, people mute their phones, and the one alert that matters gets lost. At Audio Video Extremes, we help you develop a strategic approach to your home monitoring.
We sit down with you, map out who should hear about what, program it, and test it with each person. Here's how that works.
SEE ALSO: How Smart Security Systems Protect Your Cass County Getaway
Decide Who Needs to Hear First
An alert isn’t only as good as the person at the end of it. Think through everyone who could act on a problem at your home, such as your spouse, adult kids, a caretaker, a house sitter, or a neighbor down the road. We create profiles for the ones you want to include in your alert pipeline.
We then set up what each person can see and do. Family members who live in the home get the same everyday control you have. A neighbor or caretaker can be given limited access, so they get alerts, maybe an accompanying video snapshot, and nothing more.
Match Each Alert to the Right Person and Moment
Not every alert belongs to every person. A Control4 system can notify phones when a door or window opens, a door unlocks with a specific user code, the doorbell rings with a snapshot, a water leak is detected, the temperature crosses a threshold, or a garage door is left open. Cameras can add motion or person alerts, depending on the cameras and sensors installed.
We decide who gets which one and when. A water leak or freezing temperatures go to you and the caretaker who can reach the house more quickly. Use of a teenager's door code goes to the parents. Alerts are also context-dependent, so a door-open alert might fire only when the system is set to away or after a certain hour.
Inside the home, touchscreens and speakers can chime or announce alerts, which help when a house sitter doesn’t have their phone nearby. A reminder for something easy to forget, like a garage door left open, can be set to repeat on a timer.
Only Set Alerts Worth Answering
Our brains are trained to ignore constant notification. So we want to make sure you’re only being notified for relevant information.
Detection zones and sensitivity are set for each camera at install, so a tree branch in the wind or snow falling off a branch doesn't ping anyone at midnight. Where the cameras support it, we choose person detection over plain motion detection, and each phone receives only the alerts that apply to that person.
As we mentioned, context does the most work. Daytime deliveries can stay quiet while overnight activity gets through, and door alerts can stay off while you're home.
Before we finish our initial installation, we send a test alert to everyone on the list, so each person knows what it looks like and what to do when it arrives. A few weeks in, we review which alerts were useful and which were noise, and adjust.
Contact our team to schedule a free, no-obligation consultation, and we'll map out who should hear from your lake home and when. Bring your list of names, and we'll take it from there.
