Sensor Open Close Notifications Overview in Total Connect

[SWORD SCHWING] [THUMPING] Hi, DIYers. This is Frank at Alarm Grid. We are back in our video lab working on our Total Connect tutorial videos. And today we'll be working on the sensor open-close notifications. These will be the Alerts you can configure anytime you want to receive an Alert, whether it be text, email, or push notification for a sensor being faulted or tripped-- so, whether it be a door opening, window opening, motion being tripped-- you can receive a text, email, or push notification through your Total Connect app. So we'll go ahead and traverse to the web log in. We will have a video for the mobile app set up as well. But for today, we will show you just the web log in in particular. So let's go ahead and get you over to our computer here. And we'll show you the TotalConnect2.com/login. That's just Total Connect, the number two, .com. Go ahead-- enter your username and password, and then sign in. If you have not signed up for Total Connect yet, you can visit our website, alarmgrid.com, for any details on the sign up process. You'll notice here when we first get logged in, you'll see the current status of one of our sensors. I happen to have a 5,800 mini-sensor in front of me that I just closed. So that should go away. There we go. And let's jump right into it. So the first thing you'll need to do for enabling sensor open-close is verify that you're a alarm net dealer, or Honeywell alarm company, or a security company that supports Honeywell and AlarmNet. The server that hosts Total Connect-- you'll need to make sure that sensor open-close was enabled. And it is not generally enabled by default, which is why when you come to this Sensor Events tab under the Notification section, you will not-- let me just disable that there. If you go to Enable one of these, you'll get this error, OK? It's a confusing error because it says that you've reached your max limit. But it assumes that the sensor open-close setting is enabled on AlarmNet, which it is not generally by default. So if you don't have any enabled and you get this message, you know, and you're kind of scratching your head, thinking, OK, I don't have anything enabled. But it's saying I've already done more than 10. That basically means you need to contact your AlarmNet dealer and tell them to add the service. So I'll go ahead on my other screen here-- enable it on this account, assuming that, you know, we're kind of replicating you reaching out to your security company and getting the sensor open-close feature enabled. I'll go ahead and add that. So I've done that on my end. Again, that's only something your security company can do. And then once that's enabled, if you log back in, we can navigate back to where we were in the Notification section. Go under Sensor Events. And now if we click Front Door, it'll toggle on. And we'll actually have the ability to set up Alerts as well here. This is just basically telling you-- this will show up right on the home screen of the Security section. If you go to List-- well, let's take a step back. So when talking about Notifications it's important to realize that there's two levels of setting up Alerts. There's a User Group, which is essentially a group where individual users can be assigned. The Default Group is the default group. It's the only group that's set up for starters. And the Master user, which is generally the primary user, they are automatically already assigned to that group. And I can show you that right here under the Group section. If you click into Groups, or a Default Group, you can rename this if you want. It doesn't really matter. Our main user or a Master user happens to be called Alarm Grid just for all intents and purposes. So this being checked off means that any email or text notifications that are enabled under the Master profile, in this case, or under the User profile, here-- in this case, if we go to Profile, we'll be able to see real quick we have an email here that's not currently enabled because it says Validate Now. Normally, this would not say Validate Now. So in our case, we have email notifications disabled. But if you did have the Notifications enabled and you had validated e-mails or text Alerts-- and we have other videos that will show you how to do that-- then all of these things-- all these e-mails and text Alerts-- as many as you've added under this profile or under any other User profile that you've assigned to a group-- all of those points of contact will be notified when any notification that's assigned to that group is triggered. So just take one step back again. We're going to assign Users to Groups. And then we're going to assign Notifications to those Groups. And again, the Master user-- the main log in with the master code-- is auto-assigned, and like you see here, is checked off and added to the Default Group. And you don't have to do anything there. OK? So we can just click Cancel. We're not going to save any changes. So we have this linked you can see. If you wanted to create other User groups, you could do that here. That will be in another video. And we'll go right into the List category. And we'll be able to show you how to add new Notifications. So we'll come right up here to the hamburger icon with the plus symbol. I got this HD video running through our desktop here. So it may take a minute to load. Once this loads up, what we're going to do is show you how to assign a specific events Sensor-- Open, Close Alert to the Default Group. So once this comes up here, we'll click a category. The category in this case will be Security, meaning the general category of a security sensor will be under Security. We'll select that. The Notification type will be sensor open-close. Now, again, if the Total Connect Plus or the upgraded Total Connect that we enabled earlier in this video on the AlarmNet side-- so your security company would enable that for you-- that is when you'll start to see this here. If you don't have it enabled and you're getting that error where it says you've added 10 or more already and you've added none, then this will not show up. And it means that you do not have Total Connect Plus enabled. You just have Total Connect basic service. So once Total Connect Plus is enabled, you'll see Sensor-- Open, Close. And you'll go ahead and click that. And then we choose the Trigger. So we can say, you know, whether the zone was opened or faulted, whether the zone was closed or restored, or whether the sensor was left open for a period of time. Say, you know, the Sensor Left Open categories can be very helpful for garage doors or anything that might get left open habitually that you would want to make sure that it's not left open overnight or as you leave. So we can then choose the device here. Let's go ahead and do the Front Door. And then we could Continue. And this will load up the Notification window. There's a couple more steps here. So once you have kind of pre-configured this Notification, meaning that you set it to Sensor-- Open, Close-- we have a Sensor Left Open as the Trigger. The Subject we could label what we want. In this case, instead of Sensor, I'd probably do Front Door Left Open. We have the Default Group, which is what we want. If you had other groups or other Users assigned to other groups, you could add them. You could do them instead of the Default Group. Or you could leave this as Default Group and do another one. I'll show you that in a second. And then the Scheduled State-- we can choose do we want to receive an Alert when this zone is faulted in specific armed states-- only maybe when the system is disarmed. Obviously, if this trips when the system's armed, it will create an alarm as well. So let's go ahead and say only one is disarmed. And then we can choose our time here, as far as how long it's left open for. Let's go ahead and stick with the default five minutes. But it does give you the ability to go anywhere from one minute all the way up to 12 hours, which is really nice. Once you've chosen all this, you can then Save. Now, I just quickly want to show you if you did have another User Group-- let's say you receive all the Alerts-- maybe you wanted another individual that has access to the system to receive just specifically this Alert or other specific Alerts, you could drop this down and create a new group and add them to that. Or you could create the new group in advance by going to the Group section over here, and then just choosing this dropdown after hitting this Plus Notifications symbol here. Now, because we're not going to add that and we don't want duplicates, for now we'll just go ahead and Save. You can use this opportunity to review-- make sure you have everything set properly. Make sure it's enabled. If you ever wanted to temporarily disable this Alert, you could just simply come in here and toggle that off without having to delete it and rebuild it. And let's go ahead and Save. We'll say Yes. OK. And now at this point when we fault the sensor, or when that specific zone is left open for five minutes, then it would trigger an Alert. And again, that's going to be any text or email associated with that User. If it's the Master User, like it is in this case, it will be whatever email shows up under the Master profile or push notifications if they're enabled in the app. In this case, we haven't validated the email. So we'll want to make sure that you validate that first and add any other text Alerts that you'd want. If you wanted to hit add SMS, type in your ten-digit phone number. Choose your carrier here, most popular being one of the four big companies. And then if we were to save this section, once we add all this, you'd still have to validate. So, again, we would generally want to validate first. Make sure this Email Notifications section is toggled on. And then anything that's configured in the Notifications List will generate Alerts there. So we'll go ahead and just come back to our main security interface. Again, there's multiple steps. We'll just go ahead and delete this so it lets us get out of here. We can save that. OK. There's multiple steps to adding Sensor-- Open, Close Alerts. The first is making sure that you have Total Connect Plus. And again, that's something you'll have to reach out to your dealer for. Then you'll have to configure the Alert by going into the List section and adding the Alert, and then choosing who you want it to go to, as far as assigning which Group. Once you've saved that, you can test by either opening, closing, or leaving open a sensor, and making sure that the Alerts come through. If you have any further questions on setting up Sensor-- Open, Close Alerts on your Total Connect account, you can reach out to us at support@alarmgrid.com. If you found this video helpful, please press the little Like button. And subscribe to our channel so you can check out all of our other excellent content for Honeywell's wide line of security products. All right.