Leaving Town This Summer? 5 Smart Home Moves Before You Lock the Door
Published July 2026 · By Dan, SmartHome Connect LLC · Lenexa, KS
July and August are when Kansas City empties out. Families head to the lake, the mountains, the coast — wherever isn’t 98 degrees and humid. And every summer, I get calls from homeowners who come back to a problem that a basic smart home vacation setup could have caught early — or prevented entirely.
A package sitting on the porch for six days. A water leak nobody noticed. A garage door that was left open. Someone walking up to the front door at 2 AM and nobody knew until the neighbor mentioned it a week later.
None of this is hard to prevent. You just need a few things working before you leave.
1. Know Who’s at Your Door — Even from 1,200 Miles Away
A Ring Video Doorbell is the single most useful device you can have when you’re away from home. Someone walks up to your porch — you get a notification on your phone with a video clip. Delivery driver? You see it. Stranger lingering? You can talk to them through the two-way audio, and they’ll never know you’re sitting on a beach in Florida.
I installed a Ring for a client in Overland Park last summer, right before they left for a two-week trip. On day three, they got a motion alert at 11 PM — a guy was trying door handles on their street. They watched it live, called the police, and the guy was picked up four houses down. From a hotel room in Colorado.
If your Ring is already installed but acting up — dropping offline, missing motion events, draining battery — fix it before you leave. I wrote a full troubleshooting breakdown on why Ring doorbells stop working and what actually fixes them.
2. See Your Entire Property, Not Just the Front Door
A Ring doorbell covers your entry. A network camera system covers everything else — backyard, driveway, side gate, garage. If you’re leaving for more than a weekend, having four to six cameras recording 24/7 on a local NVR means you have weeks of footage stored without monthly cloud fees.
What matters is making sure the system keeps recording if the power flickers while you’re gone. A $100 UPS battery backup on your NVR buys you 30-90 minutes of continued recording during an outage. I covered this setup in detail in my post on whether security cameras survive KC storms — and July is peak storm season, so this matters more than most people realize.
3. Make Your House Look Occupied
A dark house with an overflowing mailbox tells everyone on the street that nobody’s home. Smart plugs and smart light bulbs fix this in five minutes. Set your living room lamp to turn on at 7 PM and off at 11 PM. Set a bedroom light on a different schedule. Randomize it slightly so it doesn’t look programmed.
If you have a smart TV, you can even set it to turn on for a few hours in the evening — the blue glow through the window sells the illusion better than anything.
None of this requires a professional installation. But if you want the whole smart home vacation security system integrated — lights, cameras, doorbell, thermostat all controllable from one app on your phone — that’s something I set up regularly for clients heading out of town.
4. Don’t Come Home to a Furnace (or a Flood)
A lot of people crank the AC off before they leave to save money. In a KC July, that means your house hits 95+ degrees inside. That’s hard on electronics, it warps wood, and if you have pets being checked on by a neighbor, it’s genuinely dangerous.
Set your smart thermostat to 80-82 degrees while you’re away. The system barely runs, you save money, and the house stays safe. Most smart thermostats let you monitor and adjust remotely — so if KC hits a 105-degree heat wave while you’re gone, you can bump it down from your phone.
Water leak sensors are the other underrated vacation device. A $30 sensor under the kitchen sink or next to the water heater sends an alert to your phone if it detects water. Catching a slow leak on day one instead of day ten separates a mop job from a $15,000 remediation.
5. Lock Down the Garage
The garage is the most common entry point for break-ins, and it’s the door most likely to be left open by accident. A smart garage door controller — like the Chamberlain MyQ — lets you check whether the garage is open or closed from your phone, and close it remotely if you forgot.
If your garage has a side door, make sure it’s deadbolted. And if you have a camera system, point one camera at the garage door area. A camera facing the driveway plus a camera facing the garage gives you full coverage of the most vulnerable part of most KC homes.
The 30-Minute Pre-Vacation Rundown I Do for Clients
When clients ask me to do a pre-trip walkthrough, I check all of this in about 30 minutes: verify every camera is online and recording, test the Ring doorbell’s WiFi signal and motion zones, confirm the NVR has enough storage for the trip duration, check smart light schedules, verify the thermostat is set correctly and accessible remotely, and make sure the garage door controller is working.
If something isn’t set up yet, I can usually get it installed the same week. Ring doorbells take about an hour. A 4-camera system takes a half-day. Smart thermostats and plugs take under an hour.
Headed out of town soon? Call or text (913) 674-9723 or visit smarthomeconnectllc.com/contact-us.
Serving Lenexa, Overland Park, Olathe, Shawnee, Leawood, and the full KC metro.
