Using Light Grouping to Enhance Your Smart Solar Lights

One of the most powerful ways to use your Ring Smart Solar Lights is to group them together using the "Groups" function in the Ring app. Grouping your Smart Lights allows them to react intelligently to events that happen on your property. You can, for example, turn on all the lights on one side of the house when any single Smart Solar Light device in that group detects motion. You can also turn on and off and control large numbers of Smart Lights without having to use them individually.

Note: You will need a Ring Bridge to place Smart Lights in a Group.

Click here for more information on creating and managing light groups.

The remainder of this article will offer grouping tips and tricks to get the most out of your Smart Solar Lights.

Reduce and eliminate some motion detection

When you put your Smart Lights in a group, when one light activates, they all do. This is good in that it allows you to place a net of motion detection across a large area.

It may have a downside though, in that if every light in a group is also a motion detector you may find your lights lighting up too many times a night as every movement in the area, such as that of a small animal, triggers the motion detection.

To reduce motion activity, you can disable some of the motion sensors in a group or reduce the motion sensitivity on some of the devices in your group. Remember, you likely don't need every light in your group to activate with motion, especially in the case of larger groups.

Create several small groups rather than one large one

It's tempting when installing your Smart Lights to add all of your lights to one group. This is done in the belief that it tightens up security by putting on all of the lights in an area at once. In fact, you might find it better to group your lights in several smaller groups. Not only does that limit the number of lights that activate in the case of a false alarm, it will also give you an indication of where the intrusion is in the case of an actual alarm.

Be careful when creating "trigger" lights

This is a corollary to the first tip. If you disable some of the motion detectors on your Smart Lights to limit the number of motion activations, take notes of which lights still have active motion detection. The placement of these "trigger lights" is especially important. You'll want them at likely exits and entrances to your property as well as on likely avenue of approach. If you find that this is still creating too many false alarms, though, check on which light is the one detecting motion and disable it. You can move your "trigger light" to the next one down the line.