Why You Should Add Other Users to Your Hedge Account for Enhanced Home Protection

It might not take a village to proactively protect your home — but you could likely benefit from adding additional users (plus an emergency contact) to your Hedge account.

Here's why.

1. It Puts a Safeguard in Place if You're Not Available to Respond to an Alert

The Hedge escalation process benefits from having other users on your account. If you're not available to receive an alert, the escalation process will eventually pull in other account users, followed by your emergency contact.

A Brief Refresher on Hedge Escalations and How They Work 

For those who are new to Hedge (or who just need a refresher), here's a quick overview of the escalation process.

Your Hedge devices constantly monitor your home for abnormal, potentially problematic events. If they detect any of the below, they'll send you a Hedge App push notification to alert you to the issue.

• Smoke or carbon monoxide detectors sounding

• Water accumulation reaching .5mm 

• Shifts in humidity and temperature outside your specified range, which could help you prevent issues like mold and freezing pipes 

• General motion/noise detection or activity around your doors and windows when your home is "armed" (which Hedge users typically do when they leave the house for the day)

If you don't dismiss the alert on certain, "high-priority" events — the first two examples listed above — the escalation process will activate, and a series of notifications, texts, and calls will be made to you and other users on your account, followed by your emergency contact.

However, if there aren't any other users on the account, the escalation process will only send additional notifications, texts, and calls to you; it won't be able to loop in anybody else. In that case, your home might not have the same level of proactive protection that it could have.

2. It Makes the "Auto-Arm" Feature More Effective

If you live with another adult or children that are old enough to be home by themselves and you plan on using the auto-arm feature, we recommend you add them as users to your Hedge account. But first — let's set some context. 

A Brief Refresher on Arming and Disarming Your Home 

Most Hedge users "arm" their home when they leave for the day. Arming and disarming your home essentially controls the notifications your Hedge devices send to your Hedge App. Consider the same list from above. If your home is not armed, you'll be alerted to the first three events, but not to motion/noise; this is to reduce the likelihood of false positives, e.g. you or a family member triggering the motion/noise alerts. If your home is armed, then you will receive motion/noise-related notifications.

Notifications you'll receive regardless of whether your home is armed or not:

• Smoke or carbon monoxide detectors sounding 

• Water accumulation reaching .5mm 

• Shifts in humidity and temperature outside your specified range, which could help you prevent issues like mold and freezing pipes

Notifications you'll receive only when your home is armed:

• Motion/noise detection or activity around your doors and windows 

So What is Auto-Arm... and Why is it Only Effective with Multiple Users on the Account? 

Auto-arm is a feature you can easily enable via the Hedge App that arms and disarms your home based on the proximity of you and other users on the account to the home.

If you set up auto-arm, then your home will be armed when the last user on the account leaves the selected radius (small, medium, or large) around the home, and it will be disarmed when the first user re-enters that radius.

If you haven't added any other users to your Hedge account — say, your spouse or teenage children — the system won't be disarmed when they arrive home, meaning you'll receive an onslaught of push notifications as your Hedge devices detect their (completely benign) movement around the home.

Here are two scenarios to illustrate this point.

Scenario 1: You Haven't Added Your Spouse as a Hedge User

Scenario 2: You Have Added Your Spouse as a Hedge User

See the difference? When it comes to auto-arm, adding family members as users on your Hedge account helps your devices determine whether specific activity around the home is problematic and may require your attention.

All in all, the benefit of adding additional users to your account is two-fold. First, it helps your system function as it should, as we saw with the auto-arm example. But just as importantly, it allows you to share the weight of a significant responsibility: proactively protecting your home and everything in it.

Click here to learn how to add a user to your Hedge App.