Sometimes you want to know if windows or doors are left open. For example, we have a rental property and sometimes when people leave they accidentally leave a window open. Since we are not there we would not notice it being left open. If the environment is cold or hot it could impact the electric or gas consumption heating or cooling the room with the open door or window. Animals could get in as well as any of the elements like rain or snow. We use the Ring Alarm in our home and it gives us a platform to perform many other actions besides just telling us an intruder has entered the home. In later posts, I will talk about how to use it to monitor water leaks, Gas leaks, CO and Smoke alarms, and more.
We have the Ring Alarm set up and sensors on all the doors and windows. If a door or window is opened it triggers a notification which we normally turn off. I have created a routine using either Alexa or Home Assistant and IFTTT that will check all the sensors and tell me if one of them is left open. After our visitors leave I can use the routine to see if they left any doors or windows open and have a neighbor drop by and shut them. If during the summer we choose to leave some of the windows open then those can be set up in the routine to be skipped. You can also look in the Ring app to see if any of the sensors are open if you are a visual person.
We also use it to determine which rooms might be getting too hot in the summer. We capture the opening of doors and windows using IFTTT into a spreadsheet. We can then post-process the data to see which rooms had windows consistently opened or closed around the same time each day. There are many other uses for the data captured from these sensors. It shows how useful these sensors can be outside of detecting intrusions. if you have any useful ideas or want more details on our routines please reach out.