Try These Home Automation Ideas with Your Smart Doorbell
If you recently got a smart doorbell, you’re probably looking into its automation capabilities with a smart home hub like Homey. Of course, you can be automatically informed about visitors waiting at the front door, but smart doorbells are no one-trick ponies. There’s much more you can achieve with them when you have a Homey and a little bit of time on your hands. Take a look at the things you can try at home with Homey Flows and a smart doorbell.
Basic Automation with Smart Doorbells
Whenever there's a delivery person, a technician, or a family member on their way to your house, a smart doorbell is what you need. With one of these devices integrated into a smart home system like Homey, you can always rest assured that you don’t miss any visitors, expected or not.
It only takes a moment to manually check your front door video feed in the Homey mobile app. It's also possible to speed things up by setting up an automated notification with a Homey Flow, including a photo taken from your doorbell or security camera.
Smart Doorbell Automation Inspiration
There are also plenty of creative applications of smart doorbells that can make your home more comfortable, safer, and most of all smarter. We’ve put together a quick guide to help you get started and have fun with your smart home accessories!
Silent Mode
There are times when a regular doorbell chime will do, and there are times when you need something completely different. Smart doorbells come in handy precisely in such cases, letting you choose your preferred notification for any particular time of day, depending on whichever condition you select.
Let’s say you want to prevent anyone or anything from waking up your sleeping baby – it only takes three steps.
1. In Homey Logic, create a new Yes/No variable and name it Baby.
2. Install a Withings Sleep Monitor in the baby’s crib, and with these 2 simple Flows, you can always keep the sleep status of your child up-to-date.
3. Create actions for 2 scenarios. With the following Flow, whenever the baby is not in bed, the standard doorbell sound will play on your Sonos speaker. However, if the baby is sound asleep, your smart lights will blink and you will get a notification on your smartphone.
Doorbell Reminder
Let’s say someone rings your doorbell when you’re out and about. If you’re at work and don’t want to be disturbed, it’s easy to postpone the notification for when you return home.
1. Set up a notification to check the doorbell’s video recordings. It should be activated as soon as you open the front door to your house. The Flow should be disabled automatically after every initial run, so you don’t get bugged repeatedly about the same missed visit.
2. After creating the first Flow, disable it manually.
3. The final step requires only the following automation – whenever the doorbell rings and no one is home, Homey will enable the first Flow.
Pause the Noise
It might be easy to miss the doorbell chime when your robotic vacuum rackets as it cleans, or when you’re blasting your favorite Spotify playlist at full volume. Luckily, with this quick fix, it’s possible to pause any noise whenever someone rings your bell.
As an alternative, you can even momentarily pause any noisy appliance like a washing machine or dishwasher, if you have it connected to a smart plug.
Night Vision
Many smart doorbells feature a motion sensor, so you can get notified about visitors without them pressing the doorbell button. This feature also comes in handy at night.
Whenever motion is detected near your front door, turn on all porch lights to get a better view of the visitor on the doorbell camera and/or your security cameras. This produces a clearer picture than just your regular infrared night vision or a single floodlight. It could also discourage any burglars thinking about breaking in.
Scare off Uninvited Visitors
You can deter people from illegally entering your premises with this simple trick. Whenever your doorbell sensor detects someone and there’s no one home, play the sound of dogs barking on any smart speaker near the entrance.
You can even go bolder and play an alarm sound and have lights flash inside the house, and thus set up a DIY alarm system with the equipment you already own.
Get a Quick Reminder
Whenever there are multiple people at home, it’s easy to assume that somebody else will open the door when a visitor rings the doorbell. As it sometimes happens, when nobody opens within 30 seconds since the doorbell rang, you can get a quick reminder.
1. When the bell rings and someone is home, start a 30-second timer with the CountDown app.
2. When the timer ends, your smart speaker will notify you that nobody has opened the door yet.
3. I the front door is opened in the meantime, the upcoming notification will be canceled.
Conclusion
There’s much more to smart doorbells than you might have thought. Home automation with them can help you with the security of your home, and at the same time, it makes it easy to take care of your family and your day-to-day tasks.
You can always find new uses for your exisiting smart home accessories. All you need is just a little bit of time and the right tools. And in this case, that tool is Homey.
As you've seen above, Homey unifies and ties together your smart home, and makes you get more out of every device, including smart doorbells. So if you want to get serious with smart home, we strongly recommend you to discover Homey Bridge or Homey Pro.
Alternatively, check out the new Homey Cloud service that only requires you to download an app to your phone to get the Homey experience, no strings attached.
Also, don't forget to let us know how you automate your home with Homey. Tag Homey in a tweet or a Facebook post, and we’ll feature the best Homey Flows on our website.
