Smart home gear isn’t just for showing off to friends and automating your life. It’s also great for making your home look busy when you’re away. Here’s how to use your smart home gear to fool burglars.
Can you really fool burglars with Smart Home Gear?
Before we dive into all the clever ways you can use smart home equipment to mimic a human presence in your home, this begs the question: does mimicking a human presence in the home actually deter criminal activities?
If the criminal activity you are trying to deter is an Oceans 11 style burglary on your home or if the criminal in question is a foreign agent bent on assassinating you, then no, you will need more than a few hundred dollars worth of equipment. smart home to deter that – and you should probably spend those few hundred dollars on a ticket out of town.
But for the mundane crime of opportunity, the illusion that someone is home is an excellent deterrent. The vast majority of thieves don’t live life like every day The purge, they just want a quick and easy way to get items from your house to get money. An occupied house throws a spanner in the “quick and easy” part. You don’t have to make your house Fort Knox, you just have to make your house unattractive enough to send the person somewhere else.
If Kevin McCallister can foolThe wet bandits With a stereo, mannequins, and a cardboard cutout of Michael Jordan, we feel pretty confident with much more advanced gear, you can fool a junkie looking to steal your Xbox.
Combine the imitation of presence with a good home security systemand you’ll have all your bases covered.
How to mimic occupancy with Smart Home Gear
Maybe you are on vacation for a week. Maybe you work second shifts and want your house to look busy in the evenings, especially in the winter when it gets dark so early.
Whatever your motivation, the crux of the illusion is harnessing your smart home gear to do the things you would if you were at home. The empty houses are eerily calm and still. Occupied houses are animated with light and sound.
A quick note before you dig. You can use many of the suggestions below using the features included with a particular smart home platform or device, with your smart home platform of choice, or both.
So if a particular feature isn’t included in the device control app, consider using a smart home routine with your larger smart home platform like Google Assistant or Alexa. (And if you’re using an advanced smart home platform like Home Assistant, the sky’s the limit.)
Simulate occupancy with smart lights
Turning lights on and off to create the look of someone at home is by no means a new trick. People have been doing this with basic light timers for decades. And while you can do the same with mechanical timers or even smart plugsreal smart bulbs take it to another level.
The Philips Hue platform, for example, has vacation mode it doesn’t just turn on certain lights for a set amount of time; it actually mimics the presence of someone in the house.
Tell it to imitate you between, say, 5 p.m. and your usual bedtime of 11 p.m., and during that window it will turn the lights on and off throughout your house as if you were moving from room to room. . With one or more Hue bulbs in different rooms, it’s amazingly good.
When I come back from trips, my neighbors almost always say they didn’t know I was gone because the house seemed occupied. Sometimes even my immediate neighbors, who knew I was out of town, will say they thought I got home early.
Even without tint bulbs, you can probably recreate the effect using a similar vacation mode in yours. smart lighting platform of choice, even cheap Wyze smart bulbs have a vacation mode – by setting random timers or using an away mode if your larger smart home platform supports it. As part of the Alexa Guard feature, Alexa supports holiday mode lighting, for example.
Mimic TV with smart bulb “Party” modes
Turning the lights on and off can make it seem like someone is home, but nothing says “this house is occupied” like the familiar flicker of a TV. Back then, it was simple to put an appliance timer on your TV to turn the TV on and off because TVs had mechanical switches. But timers don’t work on modern TVs because plugging them in and unplugging them won’t turn them on.
So that you can buy specialized devices that mimic television light If you have smart bulbs or LED strips, you can use them just as easily and without investing in specialized equipment.
For example, I have a Brand Govee adaptive TV lighting configuration. When I watch TV it illuminates the wall behind the TV, but it also has many other features like holiday scenes, color animations, etc.
If you turn up the brightness all the way and choose one of the colorful, active scenes, you’ll feel like you’re watching TV. Halloween and storm themes that include quick flashes do a great job of capturing the feeling of an action movie with explosions too.
You can recreate the effect with any smart bulbs or color changing light strips with a similar “party” or random mode, however. Experiment with them until you find a combination with this familiar color palette that shimmers in the night.
Use music and podcasts to create a live-in vibe
Like lighting, sound is a strong indication that someone is home. Combine it with programmed lighting and the TV illusion above, and it will look like a full house.
If you want to automate things while keeping things relatively simple, one of the easiest ways to do this is to plug a radio into a smart plugtune the radio to a station that mostly talks (your local public radio station is ideal for this) and set a smart schedule to turn on the radio while you’re away.
If you already have smart speakers dotted throughout your home, integrating audio playback into routines is trivial. You can, for example, ask a Google Home routine to start a podcast, Spotify playlist, or other music sources.
Given how many podcasts amount to “two guys sitting around talking about random stuff” (thanks to Josh and Chuck at What you need to know) it should be easy enough to find something to play that sounds a lot like people hanging around your house talking about video games or the story of vampire panics.
Mix all these tips and no one, including burglars, will be able to tell when you’re home, at work, or on vacation.
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