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Smart home gear isn’t just for showing off to friends and automating your life.
It’s also really handy for making your home look occupied 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?
But for the run-of-the-mill crime of opportunity, the illusion that somebody is home is an excellent deterrent.
An occupied home throws a wrench in the “fast and easy” part.
Combine presence mimicking witha good home security system, and you’ll have all your bases covered.
How to Mimic Occupancy With Smart Home Gear
Maybe you’re on vacation for a week.
Empty homes are eerily quiet and still.
Occupied homes are bustling with light and sound.
A quick note before we dig in.
People have been doing it with basic light timers for decades.
With one or more Hue bulbs in different rooms, it’s uncannily good.
As part of the Alexa Guard functionality, Alexa supports vacation mode lighting, for example.
But timers don’t work on modern TVs because plugging and unplugging them doesn’t turn them on.
For example, I have aGovee-brandadaptive TV light setup.
Experiment with them until you find a combination with that familiar TV-flickering-in-the-night color scheme.
Combine it with scheduled lighting and the TV illusion above, and it’ll look like a full house.
