Alarm.com Z-Wave Light Enrollment And Automation Introduction
Hey guys, Hayden here again from Alarm Systems Store. And today I wanted to show you guys how to enroll smart devices and use them with the automation that alarm.com provides. So I don't have many automation devices at the moment. I'm still waiting on some more to come in but what I do have, though, is a Z wave dimmer light, and I'm going to enroll that on the system.
And I do want to show you guys how the rules and scenes work so as I get more devices, I'll definitely show more of the smart device adding and what you can do with them, things like that. But to start, we're just going to enroll this light and then we'll go from there. So anyway, here we are at the home screen of our alarm.com demo system.
So what I'm going to do, and this is doable on a phone as well, honestly, it's probably easier on a phone, but it is easier for me to record on the computer. So what we need to find is the managed devices menu. So to do that on a computer, you're going to go to the Settings button on the phone it is actually in the dropdown menu that pops up on the left side of the app.
I'll show a picture real quick there. But anyway, this section right here, the manage devices is what we're looking for. So whenever you click this, it's going to bring up everything that is attached to your alarm.com account. So it has my phone here as the system has the couple and door contacts, including the motion that I added.
If we want to add a new device up here at the top right there's an add device button here on the phone. There is a plus button in the bottom right corner of the picture there. But once you click Add device, it's going to ask you what type of device you are looking to add. So this is a light.
So we're going to click the lighting and appliance control button. And these are all lights and switches that alarm.com has tested and has basically installed Wizard for. So if you give any of these devices and you're going to enroll them on alarm.com, they actually have specific directions so that it's a little bit easier. You don't have to go back and forth from the equipment manual to alarm.com and all that.
This will just walk you through it. It'll tell you exactly how to get it enrolled. The light we have is not one of these though. So I'm going to click on other device and what the other device does is it brings up a wizard for just basic enrollment. So I'm going to go ahead and click continue it's going to put our system into add mode. While it's in add mode
we can now trigger the Z wave device to pair up. So for this line basically all you do is turn it off and on and then it triggers the signal to go out to the Z wave controller The IQ panel just picked it up. That's what that dinging was. So it's got device found and it is connecting that light to the network.
So this can take a second. But basically once it is finished connecting, it is going to ask you to name the device. I'm not going to change the name right now. But anyway, right there you can put the name and then click next and then when you are done, click done. Now if you have more devices, you can go through that again and just continue adding all of the devices.
I guess the light is on, but now that you can see on my home page, there is a lights card here in the bottom right. So if I click on this, this is going to give me options for adjusting the brightness of the light, as well as just turning it off or on it if I want to.
So that is... I mean you can control that directly from here. As you add new lights, more lights will pop up on here. You can adjust each one of them. All of these Z-wave devices that you add to alarm.com will come with a card that goes on your home screen and you can disable those if you want or you can keep them there for easy access.
What I would like to show now, though, is the automation side icon. So now that we have a Z wave light on here, now there is a rule that I created earlier messing around with this, so I'm going to delete that real quick. But rules on alarm.com have and if then type logic or a when then according to this but basically if you click on either the icon over here or you click select here basically when let's say for example, a sensor the front door sensor, is opened and done, then we can use this light and then it's going to ask you to turn on turn off or dim so what we can
do is choose turn on in that way with this rule in place, what's going to happen is any time we open that front door, it is going to turn on the light. You can restrict the time settings for this if you want. So let's say only after sunset or you can set length specific times during each day, or you could just run it at all times.
But once you've done all of that, you can come up here to name it and I'm going to do one, two, three. You can name it whatever you want. One important thing about the rules the more stuff you have on here, the more rules you're going to want to make. So the more rules you have, the harder it is to keep track of them.
So I do suggest naming them something that's easy to remember so that you can go directly to it if you ever need to adjust it. But anyway, once you've created your rule, you're going to click Save and now I have this rule up here so that anytime my front door sensor is tripped, that light will turn on. Let's say you have a Z wave light inside your entry door next to the keypad and it's late at night.
As soon as you open that door, that light's going to come on so that you can see to disarm the system. Or alternately, you could just use alarm.com to disarm it. But you know, the options are there either way. But now that we've created a rule, I'll get more in depth on these. The more things we add to the system.
I haven't received the items that I would like yet, but I will be adding more or showing more videos about different devices. And once we get there, I'll show you the different types of rules that can be setup for, you know, each situation. The more creative you are, the more you can do with your automation devices. But for now, quick overview is what we're doing.
So up here at the top, under automation, you will see a scene's button so we're going to click on that. And these are already created scenes that alarm.com gives you. If you have alarm.com, you've seen them, you might play with them, you might use them. But as soon as you start adding Z wave devices or smart devices, you can start incorporating those smart devices into your scenes.
So like let's take sleep, for example, if we go to edit the sleep scene by default, this is actually not on by default, but by default the system will arm in stay and that's all it's going to do for sleep mode. One thing I do recommend is turning on the no entry delay that takes off the delay times on your entry doors.
So if you're asleep at night, you don't want, you know, however long your entry delay is before your system goes off. So if you turn on that, no entry delay if any sensor is tripped, even if it's an entry zone, it is going to set off the system immediately. So I do recommend turning that on but this down here is what we're here for.
So as you can see, there's light nine, which is the light that I just added, this little plus icon on the left determines whether or not that light is attached to the scene. So if we click the plus, it is going to give me options to turn on, turn off or adjust the brightness of the light. So since this is a sleep scene, I'm going to choose to turn the light off so you can be laying in bed and click that sleep scene.
It's going to turn off your lights and it's going to arm the system in no entry delay arm stay. So once you're done setting this up, you can click Save. And now any time I use that sleep scene, it's going to turn my lights off. Alternately, I can turn on the wake up scene. And what that does is when you get up in the morning, you can click that and it will disarm your system so that nobody trips it.
And you can also add the light and turn on the lights. Now, when I wake up, I don't much care for too much bright lights. So with this dimmer light, it's kind of handy. You can set it to about 3% or so, and that way you get light. But it's not overwhelming. Once you've done that, click save and now my sleep and wake up scenes are more interactive and automated, which just allows you to better utilize the alarm.com service as well as Smart Devices. And that's really all I wanted to go over today.
I will get more in depth on this. I do want to set up like my own scene. I come up with some custom rules and stuff I'm just waiting on some Z wave devices to come in. So once they are in, I will go ahead and start on that and get those videos out for you guys so that you can start doing your own creative stuff with the automation through alarm.com but for now, hopefully this is a little bit of insight into what you can do with the automation, how it works, and kind of what you're capable of doing. Honestly
between the rules and the scenes, the only thing really limiting you is your creativity, your imagination with the smart devices you have. So if you guys have alarm.com and you have the automation side, start playing around with these rules and scenes and you know, if you're interested in alarm.com service or would like to know more about it, you can always hit us up at AlarmSystemStore.com, give us a call, send us an email or whatever, we'll go over it with you and show you how it works.
Talk about how we do the services and things like that. But I hope you guys enjoyed this. I know it's just a quick little short tutorial, but it is important to know how to utilize alarm.com to the fullest because I've noticed a lot of people, our customers and other people that have alarm.com, if I ever talk to them, they're just not really utilizing as much as you can with the services provided to you.
So hopefully this will influence people out there to start playing around more with these rules and scenes and, you know, maybe do some cool stuff with the automation side of it. So anyway, I will let you guys go, like, comment, subscribe. You guys know the drill, but I will catch you guys on the next one.