How to Use Vacation Mode in Your Smart Home

If you are going out for a vacation, you must plan things accordingly. It includes taking care of the home that you are leaving for a while as well. When smart home devices are installed in your home, you don’t have to worry much about your home as they take care of it entirely. But many smart home devices such as Google Home hub and Nest thermostat come with a kind of vacation mode feature that you need to enable when you are going out for a vacation. You can find various devices in the market that have the same vacation mode type of features.

Source : http://au-norton.com/how-to-use-vacation-mode-in-your-smart-home/

Here are a few of them:

August smart lock

You get the option to set up a guest account in the August smart lock so that a known person can enter and take care of your house.

Wi-Fi security cameras

Most of the Wi-Fi security cameras have motion detection feature that alerts the owner whenever any movement is detected on the camera. So, if you place the camera on the entrance gate, it is possible to identify thieves quickly. Make sure you set the security camera in this way.

Nest Thermostat

You can save energy while you go away from home through the Away mode in the thermostat. As you don’t have to either keep the house cold or warm. Adjust the same setting accordingly before leaving your home.

WeMo Plugs and Switches

There is an option to configure Away Mode in WeMo plugs and switches also. They allow you to turn them on or off on a schedule while you are not present. Hence, don’t forget to configure them too.

D-link leak detector

Water pipe damage can cost you a lot. Through the D-link leak detector, you can save that cost. When you configure it accordingly, it alerts you, and you can let your neighbors know about the issue.

For betterment, even if the devices don’t have a vacation mode or type of features, you need to adjust their settings accordingly while you are leaving.

Use IFTTT applets

As it is hard to program all the smart home devices in your home correctly, you can choose to control them with the help of cloud services. IFTTT comes as the perfect solution as it integrates with most of the smart home devices present in the market and comes as free cloud service. It also has a mobile app that will be ideal for using while you are away. If you don’t own an IFTTT account, you will have to create one first. Here’s how you can set up IFTTT:

1. Open IFTTT and go to My Applets. Then, hit the New Applet option.

2. Now, choose the ‘this’ option and enter ‘time’ in the search column.

3. Move ahead with the process by selecting ‘Date & Time’ and then ‘Every day at’ option.

4. Set the time accordingly and click on Create trigger once you are done.

5. Click on ‘that’ button and type in the brand name of the device you own, for example, WeMO.

6. Choose the Turn on option now.

7. Then, select the switch that you desire to turn on and click on Create Action.

8. Enable the applet by clicking the Finish button.

After you implement these steps correctly, the selected lights will turn on every day at the same time. For turning off the same light, you will have to repeat the same process and select turn off. If you wish to create an illusion are that someone is there while you are on vacation, you can create various applets for turning lights on and off.

Billy Mark is a self-professed security expert; he has been making the people aware of the security threats. His passion is to write about Cyber security, cryptography, malware, social engineering, internet and new media. He writes for Norton security products at norton.com/setup.