I tagged this as “OG” as I have to pick one and that’s the one I’ve tested this on. Should apply to all/most cams though.
I was very confused about how to ensure I’d get alerts for an alarm going off, but NOT other sounds. The documentation isn’t clear (actually is incomplete) and discussions on it are buried in other threads.
You must have notifications turned on for that cam. Otherwise, you will not get alarm notifications no matter what you set other places. This is the part that was not clear in the documentation.
Obviously go into alarms and enable one or both (might as well do both, it does a good job of differentiating them).
In detection settings, if you aren’t going to enable recording/notifications for the “other sounds” category, then crank the sound sensitivity up to 100. If you do have “other sounds” enabled this may be problematic and you’ll probably want to stick with the default, or something between that and 100, may have to test and tweak.
In Event Recording, if you don’t want any sound events to be recorded, toggle off Sound. Don’t worry, alarms override this setting. If you do want some or all sound events to record (to SD or the cloud) then leave it on.
Choose either all events or smart detection events and go into customize. Set the tag (record) and notify however you want. Again, alarms will always override these settings, so these are only for things other than alarms. Note that if you have sound disabled on the previous menu, then any “tag” settings for sound here have no effect. Same if you have motion disabled.
Under notifications, as mentioned, it must be ON. You can go into “manage” here and confirm your settings are the same they were on the events customization, they should be (except for “other” which if you have cam plus/unlimited, seems to only show in one of the two places).
With the above settings, alarms will record an event and send a notification (assuming you have your OS set to allow notifications) no matter what. Obviously the alarm must be close enough to the cam to be picked up. It seems to trigger after about 10 seconds of the alarm going off.
ONE BIG CAVEAT. If you have a rule (automation) that disables notifications, it will also disable alarm notifications. So keep that in mind. I had to change from using “I’m home” and “I’m away” to control my notifications to going into the notification settings and checking off “other motion” when I’m away.
There is a “wishlist” topic I created to have the alarms also override the main notifications enabled/disabled setting. This would ensure automations don’t inadvertently disable alarm notifications. Feel free to go and vote for that.
