So, I’ve never had a security system before. I’m curious to see how people are using Armed Stay in SHM. I totally get Armed Away. I have all my door and motion sensors as part of that.
For Stay, I was thinking just adding the door sensors. However, if I were to get up in the middle of the night, go downstairs and decide to go into the garage to get something (like a roll of paper towels), it would obviously go off. Now, short of moving the paper towels our of the garage, any ideas on how to use this better?
I guess I could somehow get it to go into Disarmed mode when it senses motion downstairs, but that sort of defeats the purpose, right?
With Armed Stay, you would only want to use your perimeter contact sensors. So in the case of the garage don’t use the internal door to your garage, just use the garage door. Armed Stay means someone is inside the house.
I did not include the motion sensors in the armed stay for obvious reasons. Neither the outdoor sensor (fibaro) due to passing cars. Kuna lights works wonderfully outdoors even though it does not have night vision. I have had zero false alerts with those. Wish they were supported in ST. Sorry for deviating from the topic.
I use armed away only, even for when we are home. No motion detectors upstairs. If someone needed to go downstairs they can run the good morning routine and then good night again when they go back up.
I don’t have contact sensors on my windows, just my doors. If all my windows were monitored I might use armed stay.
FYI all day yesterday I had a control outage. All the sensors worked and reported, I could see them in the log, Internet was fine. But all my commands, minimote, phone apps did not send commands, and plugs did not switch.
Most annoying, but I am certain it was self-induced, not really a ST infrastructure problem since I was trying to exclude a persistent oddball plug-in, first with the phone app then with the IDE. I just didn’t know exactly what I was doing (read the device directions for exclusion and reset!). Then I rebooted and power cycled the hubv1 a couple times in the past day but it only just resolved with a power cycle today. What a relief - I was not looking forward to trying to reset/include all the plug devices. Particularly the Aeon micro switch in the ceiling fan since I don’t have an external switch wired to it.
FYI if you had a similar outage at the wrong time then I don’t think you could run Hello-Home/Routines or disarm. Your sirens would probably not sound, but alarm notifications might be sent to your call list.
If I could get the kind of yellow alerts that we had with the old dashboard groups, then I would be using armed stay all the time.
I don’t use smartthings for my security system, we have a separate system for that.
I did use it to monitor all kinds of open door, open gate situations in areas of the house which are not easily wheelchair accessible. So I could immediately tell at a glance if someone had left the window open in the guestroom, or left the linen closet door open, or left the front gate open.
I do want to get notifications on this, and I want the dashboard to have a yellow alert condition that just reminds me that whatever that is is open.
I don’t want a Red alert condition with sirens going off or “intruder alert” messages appearing on the tablet control centers all around the house.
So if I could get yellow alerts on the dashboard, that’s what I would use armed stay for. Several people are home, there’s some coming and going, but the linen closet has been open for two minutes, maybe somebody should check that.
So for me, armed stay goes perfectly with “review needed” yellow alert status. But since I no longer have yellow alerts, I don’t have much use for armed stay.
