From Chaos to Calm: Your Guide to Fixing Too Many Blink Camera Alerts
Blink cameras are designed to provide simple, effective security, but a constant flood of notifications can make them feel anything but helpful. If your phone is buzzing every few minutes with alerts from passing cars, swaying trees, or even the neighbour's cat, it's time to take control of your settings.
This guide will walk you through the essential adjustments in the Blink app to reduce unwanted notifications and ensure you're only alerted to what really matters.
## Why Your Blink Camera is Overactive
Understanding the cause is the first step to fixing the problem. The most common reasons for excessive Blink alerts are:
- High Motion Sensitivity: The camera's motion sensor is calibrated to be extremely sensitive by default.
- Environmental Triggers: Movement from foliage, shadows, or even rain can be enough to trigger an alert.
- No Activity Zones: The camera is monitoring its entire field of view, including areas with constant, irrelevant motion like a busy road or public pavement.
- Short Retrigger Time: The camera starts looking for a new event almost immediately after the last one, leading to multiple clips of the same event.
- Infrared (IR) Sensitivity: At night, the IR light can attract insects or highlight falling rain, causing false triggers.
## Step-by-Step Solutions to Reduce Blink Notifications
Let's dive into the Blink app and make some changes. Remember to adjust one setting at a time and then test, so you know what's working.
### 1. Adjust Motion Sensitivity
This is your first and most important adjustment.
- Open the Blink App: Select the camera you want to configure.
- Access Settings: Tap the settings slider icon next to the camera's name.
- Go to Motion Settings: Scroll down to the 'Motion Detection' section.
- Lower the Sensitivity: You'll see a slider for Sensitivity. The default is often around 7. Try lowering it to 3 or 4. This tells the camera to ignore smaller, less significant movements.
- Save and Observe: Tap 'Save' and monitor the camera's behaviour.
### 2. Create Activity Zones
Activity Zones are incredibly powerful. They let you mask out problem areas in the camera's view.
- Go to Motion Zone Settings: From the camera settings screen, tap on 'Motion Zones'.
- Define Your Zones: You'll see a grid overlay on your camera's view. Tap on the squares where you do not want the camera to detect motion. These squares will turn grey, becoming inactive.
- Be Strategic: Grey out any areas with constant motion, such as roads, footpaths, waving flags, or large bushes. Leave the areas you want to monitor, like your front door, driveway, or garden path, as active (blue).
- Update and Save: Tap 'Done' to save your new zone configuration.
### 3. Increase the Retrigger Time
This setting controls how soon the camera will begin a new recording after the previous one has finished.
- Find Retrigger Time: This setting is located in the 'Motion Detection' section of the camera's settings.
- Increase the Delay: The default can be as low as 10 seconds. Increase this to 30 or even 60 seconds. This prevents you from getting multiple notifications if a person is just lingering in the area for a minute. The camera will capture the first event and then wait for the set time before it's ready to trigger again.
### 4. Control Infrared (IR) Intensity
If you get a lot of false alerts at night, the IR light might be the culprit.
- Access IR Settings: In the camera settings, find the 'Night Vision' section.
- Adjust Intensity: You'll see a setting for IR Intensity with options like Low, Medium, and High. If the camera is facing a nearby surface (like a wall or soffit), the IR can create a bright glare, amplifying things like dust or rain. Try lowering the intensity to 'Low'.
By combining these four adjustments, you can dramatically reduce the number of unwanted alerts from your Blink system, making it a much more effective and less intrusive security tool.