It’s a nice luxury to have a vacation home to go to when you need to escape regular life or when you are ready for a family vacation. But during those times when you can’t be at your vacation home, it’s comforting to know that your home is safe and protected. Home automation provides time and money saving conveniences you’ll wonder how you lived without before.

Lock/Unlock Doors

From any mobile or other web-enabled device, you can use your ADT Pulse home automation system to make sure doors are locked or unlocked when you need them to be. When you aren’t at the house, you can automatically lock all the doors with the touch of a single button. Or, perhaps you need to let a repair man in to do some work. Instead of driving to the home yourself, or leaving a spare key, you can simply unlock the door at the time of service and then lock it up again once the repair is complete. And getting locked out of the house can be a thing of the past. Locking and unlocking doors from any location takes a lot of stress off your shoulders and frees up your time to do other things.

Lighting Schedules

One of the problems with owning a vacation home is that people can notice no one is home for an extended period of time. When the home looks unoccupied, it becomes more vulnerable to a break-in. Even though your home is used for vacations, other people around don’t have to know you don’t live there year round. You can create a lighting schedule with your home automation system that turns the lights on and off during different times of the day, as they would if someone was home. When lights are on in a home, thieves can be deterred. The peace of mind knowing your home is less vulnerable is one of the many benefits of a lighting schedule you can set up with your home automation system.

Monitor the Home

From almost anywhere, you can monitor what’s happening in and around your home. Simply log in to the desktop or mobile app with any web enabled device and you can control what’s happening in your home without even being there. ADT Pulse gives you the ability to remotely monitor your home, 24-hours a day. This home automation system gives you the capability to arm and disarm your security system, turn on lights, check monitor sensors, lock/unlock doors, and more. Knowing everything is under control at your vacation home is a security feature that regular security systems just don’t offer.

Get Notifications

In addition to being able to set a lighting schedule, monitor the surroundings or remotely lock/unlock doors, you can also set up notifications for what happens in and around your vacation home. You can choose to receive notifications if an alarm is triggered or if the flood sensors are set off. You will know what is going on at all times at your vacation home, and have the security needed with notifications emailed or texted directly to you.

Having a vacation home is a lot less stressful when you’re able to control the home’s surroundings with a home automation security system when you’re away.

How else do you keep your vacation home safe when you’re not there?

Elli is a writer from Salt Lake City.  When she’s not blogging about home security, she can be found enjoying the outdoors!