A Guide to Reducing Unifi Protect False Notifications
Unifi Protect is a powerful surveillance system, but receiving a constant stream of false notifications can quickly become a major annoyance. Alerts for swaying trees, changing shadows, or passing headlights not only clutter your timeline but can also lead to "alert fatigue," causing you to miss a genuinely important event.
This guide will walk you through the essential settings within Unifi Protect to dramatically reduce the number of false positive alerts you receive, ensuring that when your phone buzzes, it's for something that actually matters.
## Understanding Why False Notifications Happen
Before we adjust settings, it's helpful to understand the common culprits behind false alerts:
- Environmental Movement: The most common cause is movement from things like trees, bushes, flags, or even heavy rain.
- Lighting Changes: Fast-moving clouds creating shifting shadows, or car headlights at night, can be misinterpreted as motion.
- Insects and Animals: Spiders building webs in front of the lens or small animals can trigger alerts.
- Poorly Configured Zones: If your motion zones include a busy pavement or a neighbour's property, you will inevitably get unwanted notifications.
## The Ultimate Solution: Smart Detections
The single most effective way to eliminate false alerts is to use Smart Detections. This feature uses on-camera AI to identify specific types of objects. Instead of getting an alert for any motion, you can choose to only be notified for Person or Vehicle detections.
- Open your Unifi Protect application.
- Select the camera you want to configure.
- Go to the camera's Settings.
- Tap on Detections.
- Enable Smart Detections and choose the types you want to be alerted for (e.g., People, Vehicles).
- Then, go to the Notifications settings for that camera and ensure notifications are enabled for your chosen Smart Detections.
For most users, switching to Smart Detections for notifications will solve more than 90 percent of false alert problems.
## Fine-Tuning with Activity Zones
Activity Zones (sometimes called Motion Zones) are your next most powerful tool. They tell your camera to completely ignore motion in certain parts of the image.
### How to Configure Activity Zones:
- In the camera's settings, go to Activity Zones.
- You will see the camera's live view. Tap or click to draw a zone around the area you do want to monitor. For example, draw it tightly around your walkway and front door, but exclude the public pavement, the road, and any trees that move in the wind.
- You can create multiple zones. Be precise. The more accurately you define your zones, the fewer false alerts you'll get.
- In the zone settings, you can also adjust the Motion Sensitivity.
### Adjusting Motion Sensitivity
Inside the settings for each Activity Zone, you'll find a Motion Sensitivity slider. This slider controls how much pixel change is required to trigger a motion event.
- High Sensitivity (e.g., above 80): Will detect very small movements, making it prone to false alerts from insects, shadows, and rain.
- Low Sensitivity (e.g., below 40): Requires a much larger object to move before an alert is triggered.
Start with a setting around 60-70 and adjust it based on your results. If you are still getting false alerts from trees, lower the sensitivity. If the camera is failing to detect people, increase it.
## Other Important Settings
- Minimum Motion Trigger: In the main Detections settings, you can set a "Minimum seconds of motion to trigger event". Setting this to 1 or 2 seconds can help filter out very brief events, like a bird flying past quickly.
- Notification Scheduling: If you only need to be alerted at certain times (e.g., overnight or when you're away), use the Notification Schedule. This won't reduce the number of recorded events, but it will stop your phone from buzzing unnecessarily.
By combining Smart Detections with carefully drawn Activity Zones and correctly tuned sensitivity, you can transform your Unifi Protect system from a noisy distraction into a precise and reliable security tool.