I find myself leaving my office and some times forgetting to arm the system. Also I have employees that are in and out and it’s a 24/7 business so having it automated for a time doesnt work.
Is it possible to install a few motion sensors and some how make it so if they don’t detect motion for a period of time arm the system for me? This isn’t the default way of arming it would be a fail safe if someone went in at 9pm for 30 minutes and left and no one came back till 10am or something it would be armed for 90% of that time or whatever instead of none of it.
My suggestion is to set arming event, and arming notification alerts, and then remotely arm system.
like so:
There would not be a way to automatically arm like that. I can think of a couple alternatives:
- Using Zwave Locks you could set rules to automatically arm when the door is locked, so you would have to forget to do both in order for the system to remain disarmed.
- Use Geoservices to set up arming reminders when the last associated smartphone leaves a Geofence around the location. This can get a bit tricky and unreliable if you have a lot of different people with access.
If you are referring to an Overhead garage door, you would likely need to use notifications to create arming reminders. These cannot be set based on sensor status. A sensor going idle for a period of time does not guarantee in the vast majority of circumstances that all individuals have left the property.
In this case the Geofence based reminders may work best. It would require that they allow Geoservices to run on their smartphone, that way you can receive an arming reminder when the last device leaves the geofence, no matter who it is.
I have a sensor on the door so i know when its open or closed but there is no way for the system to know if i opened it, walked in, and closed it, or if i opened it, walked out, got in my car and drove away, then closed it. The door also has a built in deadbolt that auto locks when the door hits the bottom of its travel so theres no “lock” like the front glass door.
The problem is that the system would have no way of knowing the “walked out, got in my car and drove away” part. Non-battery operated motion detectors would need to cover the entire property for effective use of occupancy to know when someone is not around (if someone is around is easy to say, motion was activated, window was opened, etc.).
It’s not something the panels can currently do.
Only Locks at this time can affect automation of the security panel arming status as far as empower rules go.
It might be useful to allow the Liftmaster commands to close the garage door auto-arm the alarm system, but it is not an option currently. I’ll bring this up to Alarm.com.
I would only need 3 motion sensors. There is literally 3 rooms.
As far as the liftmaster goes that brings us back to how does it know I dropped the door from the outside vs inside?
It wouldn’t. It would only know if you sent an open or closed command.
The concept of monitoring occupancy sensors to determine whether someone is there or not and putting that information to use as a variable in automation rules is not an impossible suggestion. The systems are just not built for that right now.
I’ll see if these ideas have been in discussion at ADC. They use a form of occupancy sensing for notifications generated from the Wellness add-on, but it is not a variable in automation.