Receiving Too Many Alerts From Your Ring Device? Here's the Solution
While your Ring device is an excellent tool for security, being bombarded with constant, unnecessary notifications can be more annoying than helpful. Alerts for passing cars, swaying trees, or your pet running around the garden can lead to 'notification fatigue', causing you to ignore an alert when it really matters.
The key to a better experience is fine-tuning your motion detection settings. This guide will show you how to use Ring's powerful features to reduce unwanted alerts and ensure you only get notified about the events you care about.
Understanding Why You Get False Alerts
Your Ring device detects motion in a few different ways, but all are susceptible to triggers that aren't genuine threats. Common causes of excessive alerts include:
- High-Traffic Areas: The camera's view may include a busy street, a public pavement, or a neighbour's property.
- Moving Objects: Trees, bushes, flags, or even shadows shifting as the sun moves can trigger motion.
- Light Changes: Headlights from cars at night or the sun coming out from behind a cloud can be interpreted as motion.
- Insects and Animals: A spider building a web across the lens or a neighbourhood cat wandering by are common culprits.
How to Optimise Your Ring Motion Settings
You can find all the settings you need within the Ring app. Open the app, select your device, and go to Motion Settings.
1. Customise Your Motion Zones
This is the most effective tool for reducing unwanted alerts. Motion Zones let you tell your Ring device exactly where to look for motion.
- In Motion Settings, tap on Edit Motion Zones.
- You will see your camera's view with a default zone. You can adjust the shape and size of this zone, or add new ones.
- Crucially, draw your zones to cover only the areas you care about. For a front door, this might be your path and porch. Exclude the street, the pavement, and any large bushes that move in the wind. Be precise. A well-drawn zone is the best defence against false alerts.
2. Adjust Motion Sensitivity
After setting your zones, you can adjust how much movement is required to trigger an alert within those zones.
- In Motion Settings, you'll find a Motion Sensitivity slider.
- If you are getting too many alerts, reduce the sensitivity.
- This makes the device less likely to trigger from small or distant movements. It's a balancing act; you don't want to reduce it so much that it misses a real person approaching. Test it after each adjustment.
3. Use Smart Alerts (Ring Protect Subscription Required)
If you subscribe to a Ring Protect plan, you have access to advanced, AI-powered filtering.
- In Motion Settings, tap on Smart Alerts.
- Here, you can choose to be notified only for Person detections.
- When this is enabled, Ring's servers will analyse the motion, and if it's determined to be a car, a tree, or an animal, you simply won't get an alert. This is an extremely effective way to cut down on notification noise.
4. Set a Motion Schedule
A Motion Schedule allows you to disable alerts automatically during times you don't need them.
- In the main device settings menu, tap on Motion Snooze.
- Here you can set a schedule for specific days and times when alerts should be turned off. For example, you might disable alerts during the afternoon when your children are playing in the garden.
By combining well-drawn Motion Zones, appropriate sensitivity levels, and features like Smart Alerts, you can transform your Ring experience from noisy and distracting to quiet, intelligent, and effective.