Smart Home Technology that can help protect your home

Alexa and Siri aside, there are plenty of ways you can up the smart ante in your home that don’t involve chatting with a bot. Honey’s focus is to reveal today’s digital narrative as a positive, protective, and proactive one.

Entry-level to smart home devices, or still a little skeptical? To protect your home from avoidable mishaps, thieves, or accidents hiding in plain sight, you could a) hire a night watchman, or b) embrace that the good old days are in fact, right now.

Let’s get into the best smart home technology to protect your home.

Smart Home Sensors

You might have seen this coming. With smart home monitoring that uses sensor technology, you can be alerted to movement, water leaks, sounding alarms and temperature changes that occur within range of where the sensors are placed. Honey’s smart home sensors by Notion are triggered by a rise or fall in your temperature thresholds, water leaks, and doors opening or closing. The Notion sensors we offer with eligible home insurance policies are smart, but they’re not “listening to your conversations” smart. Nor do we want them to be. Honey only looks at whether your sensors are active or inactive so you can have peace of mind (and make the most of your smart home insurance discount).

Bluetooth or Wi-Fi Door Locks

Home automation installation starts with smart locks, which can help to make your home more secure. Smart locks can be connected to your smartphone by using Bluetooth, an app associated with the device or Wi-Fi. Some smart locks can even detect your presence automatically and for best practice, you can connect them to other automated systems to alert you to break-ins wherever you are.

Security Cameras with Wi-Fi & Remote Monitoring

Modern smart cameras rely on Wi-Fi and connect to your smartphone. Once connected, you will be able to monitor your home with a live stream. See who is coming in and leaving your house while you are not around. Security and outdoor cameras work to discourage criminals from coming into your property, not to mention, they provide hard evidence if they do carry out any crime. Can’t argue with that. There are even cameras with motion detectors that will set off a bright floodlight and sirens to scare off thieves

Fingerprint Scanners

Forget codes, passwords, and house keys, fingerprint scanners to unlock your doors and windows are the way of the future. Only those with an authorised fingerprint would be able to unlock the house. Even better, fingerprints cannot be shared or lost - keeping hackers and thieves at bay.

Intelligent Garage Systems

A remote garage door opener can come in really handy, especially if you are a frequent traveller. You can easily open and close the garage door remotely and if for whatever reason your garage door is open while you are away, you will be alerted immediately. You can also place Honey’s smart home sensors on your garage door to be alerted of opening and closing

Light Automation

In the vein of mockupancy, use light automation to simulate how your house may look when you’re home, in the event that you’re away. You can easily give people the impression that someone is at home by setting up lights to go on and off at certain times. It can also be a great safety tool if you have older family members living at home and have trouble getting around to turn lights on and off.

Smart Doorbell

Video doorbells are a big advantage to home security for several reasons. If there is in fact potential danger at the door, or if your children are home alone, you can answer the door via live video and answer using audio. That way, nobody will have to know whether you are home or not.

How to keep your smart devices safe:

It’s important to think about the next level of security. That is, securing your security. You could think you’ve got this home protection thing on lock, but systems without firewalls, VPNs, and virus detectors can leave your house a sitting duck for hackers who could use your devices against you.

Consider the following network safety tips:

1. Always use strong passwords that you don’t use for anything else when setting up your router and home network and make sure none of your devices are using the default passwords they came with.
2. Make sure your router is encrypted. WPA2 is a common encryption method and can be accessed through your router.
3. Use Two Factor Authentication when available. Annoying yes, but this will act as a robust barrier against hackers.
4. Create a guest network. This will make sure visitors don’t have access to the same network that your security devices are on. Not because your visitors are untrustworthy, but they could be a gateway for hackers to get onto your network.
5. Routinely check devices to ensure there were no outages that reset their settings. We all know how annoying it is to reset clocks on the oven and elsewhere when a power outage occurs.

Honey Insurance’s smart home system has been developed by our (really) smart friends at Notion. Notion is a leading technology partner for smart property monitoring, supporting proactive maintenance, and providing value-add smart technology for their customers. You’ll be delighted to know, ​​Notion implements world-class security on their devices (aka Honey sensors). This includes:

• End-to-end encryption for over-the-wire transmissions
• AES 256-bit encryption for all data transfers between the bridge and sensors (that’s the same level of security as a bank vault)
• OAuth 2.0 for client authentication (the same level of authentication that Facebook and Twitter use)
• Third-party security and penetration testing to validate systems are well-protected from attack.

Want to know more about Honey’s smart home sensor devices? Have a look at our FAQs, or get an in-depth rundown from Notion.

Don’t forget to read the fine print

Insurance issued by RACQ Insurance Limited ABN 50 009 704 152, AFSL 233 082 and distributed by Honey Insurance Pty Ltd ABN 52 643 672 628, AFSL 528244. Conditions, limits and exclusions apply. This is general advice only and does not take into account your personal objectives, financial situation or needs and may not be right for you.  Always read the PDS, any applicable SPDS and TMD available at honeyinsurance.com before making any decision.