Help with ideas, keep away deers :)

Hello we have a small summer house where we spend time during the summer and weekends. My wife loves gardening and spends a lot of time on this. Unfortunately, the deer regularly eat up her plantings. Building a fence around the site is an alternative, but the idea of ​​sitting behind the fence does not feel attractive. When I started to automate my home I thought it was possible to set up a surveillance camera and when the deer show up scare them away. Someone who has some advice to give how to do.

There are motion-activated sprinklers that you could try

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You could use a camera system such as Arlo with a rule such as: when armed if camera detects animal motion then sound siren. You could do that with just the Arlo system you wouldn’t even need smartthings.
However I’m sure you don’t want a siren to be going off all the time, or at least your neighbours would not, so I imagine some other sound making device would be better, triggered by smartthings.

That sounds like a much better idea

There are sound-based pest repellent devices too. Someone down our street has something in their front yard that emits high-pitched chirps based on motion. I don’t think it’s loud enough to be heard inside, but it sure is annoying when we walk by their house. But I guess getting chirped at on the sidewalk is better than getting sprayed.

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Not sure about where you are, but the deer here could care less about noise when they find something they like munching on.

Do Arlo have “animal detection”?
I don’t know how neighbour’s would react on a siren going on and off :slight_smile:

If I was your neighbor, I’d sure not appreciate loud noisemakers going off at all hours.

We live in the country in central Texas so I’m very familiar with deer eating expensive plants. And trampling the ones they don’t eat. I fenced off their easy access to our plantings, they just figured out how to walk around it by climbing stairs and ducking under a railing. Keep in mind that deer can jump an 8ft fence.

One of my neighbors uses the motion-activated sprinklers mentioned above. If you’ve got an open area, I’m told they work well. One of my other neighbors suggested “if the deer eat it, don’t plant more of that”.

Good luck!

Arlo does have animal detection (along with People, Vehicle and Parcel categories) and you can trigger Arlo notifications when animals are detected. However I looked at this in more detail last night and I don’t think the ST integration exposes the category and you can’t set Arlo to only report motion if certain categories are detected, just to report the category after motion has been detected. So I’m no longer sure Arlo will help your use case. Apologies.

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Sprinkler sounds like a good idea, misfire is not fatal :wink:
We tried to find something not so tasty, but it seems to be correlated with not so fun…
We live in the area of Stockholm.

Yep. Same on this side of the planet. My wife said “well maybe all we can grow is rocks”