Whether you live alone with pets or not, staying connected to what’s going on at home while you’re traveling can be a challenge. Sure, we may all have mobile apps like Facebook Messenger or Facetime that help us communicate with friends and family while traveling, but what about your home – what’s going on while you’re away? How do you make sure that your pet-sitter or home-sitter stopped by to check on on your home? Thank goodness for the Canary, a smart home security device that can help keep an eye on your home when you’re away.
What Does the Canary Do?
There are lots of expensive and hard to manage security systems on the market. The Canary is a little different. The device features a camera that sits in your house and keeps an eye on every movement. It automatically activates when you leave the house and will turn off when you arrive home. When the Canary detects activity, it will alert you via your smartphone. You’ll be able to see video of what was detected and then you can choose to alert the police and/or sound an alarm. Trust me, this alarm is pretty loud and should scare any intruder.
Other Features
If you’re just curious in knowing what’s going on at home, the Canary also lets you randomly check in while you’re away. You can activate the camera to check on the pets, home-sitter or whatever you’ve got going on. You can even listen in to what you’re viewing, as the app also allows you to hear what’s going on as you live-stream. But there’s also another great feature that I really like, the Canary also monitors air quality, temperature and humidity. This way you know what type of temperature you’re pets are experiencing while you’re away.
Other features are the following:
- Learns patterns – Canary’s algorithm-based motion detection learns over time to send you smarter notifications with fewer false alarms.
- Night vision – Canary’s motion-activated recording automatically starts whenever it senses movement, and uses a 147° wide-angle lens with automatic night vision for superior image quality.
- Multiple users – Connect everyone in your home. It’s easy to share access with your family members or roommates using the free Canary app.
- Connect multiple devices – Canary’s system can monitor multiple locations, so you can have Canary devices in your apartment, your vacation home, and anywhere else you want to secure, and control them all from the same app. Each location can have up to four Canary devices.
Canary costs $199 for a single device and available on Verizon.com. The basic plan is free, which includes 12 hours of video history, and 3 video downloads. You can add more video storage and additional monthly downloads for between $5 and $30 a month.