Quick answer

Mute from dusk on Thursday 5 November until the next morning, then again over the weekend of 7 and 8 November. Use the control labelled Notifications, Alerts or Snooze, never one labelled Detection, Disarm, Standby, Privacy or Off, so the camera keeps recording. Recording itself has to be switched on first: a plan on Ring, storage on Blink, Record Video on eufy. The signal that beats the clock: on the night itself, mute once alerts arrive in bursts.

Reading this on the night? Mute on the Notifications, Alerts or Snooze screen only. Leave anything labelled Detection, Disarm, Standby, Privacy or Off alone. Take the longest duration the app offers, set an alarm for when it lapses and another for the morning to switch alerts back on, then read the rest next year.

Table of contents

The one control you must not touch

Every system here has two switches that look almost identical in the app. One stops your phone buzzing. The other stops the camera seeing anything, and on most systems that stops it recording too. Get them the wrong way round and you have picked the worst night of the year to have no footage of your drive. Here is where six of the systems most common on UK shelves draw that line, from their own UK support pages.

  • Ring. Motion Alerts is the toggle you turn on to receive an alert. Motion Detection, sitting beside it, is the one Ring says must be enabled for the device to detect and record motion events. Mute the first, never the second, and prefer step 3's timed Snooze to the Motion Alerts toggle, which stays off until you remember it.
  • Blink. Snooze pauses notifications and, Blink says, cameras still record motion if you have a storage option in place. A disarmed system will not record motion events or send motion notifications.
  • Arlo. Mute Notifications is a timed silence that leaves your modes alone, applied to every device on a Location at once. Standby is the mode Arlo uses to disarm, and by default no camera detects or records in it.
  • Tapo and Kasa. Notifications switch off per device or account-wide without touching the camera. Avoid Privacy Mode: TP-Link says that when it is on the camera stops streaming and recording video and audio.
  • Google Nest. Notification settings sit per device in the Google Home app. Turning the camera off is a different thing, and Google is blunt: a camera switched off in the app will not detect sound or motion, stream live video, or record and save activity.
  • eufy. Push Notification is set per mode, so you can silence the phone inside the mode you are already in. Home mode is quiet too, but eufy says it only records if Record Video is enabled in that mode. Disarmed disables all detection functions.

What is actually setting the camera off

Fireworks are not one trigger, they are several, and they do not all reach every camera.

Two kinds of sensor, and they fail differently

Blink publishes the clearest account of this because it ships both. Its cameras use either a passive infrared sensor, which reads heat energy from anything in view, or pixel difference analysis, which compares each frame of video to the next looking for a set amount of change. Blink names the Mini and Mini 2 as the frame-comparison models, and the Outdoor 4, Wired Floodlight, Outdoor and Indoor (3rd Gen), Indoor (1st Gen), XT2 and XT as the infrared ones.

That split predicts your night. A frame-comparison camera treats a firework burst exactly as it treats a headlight: the whole frame changes brightness in an instant, so it records. TP-Link describes the same mechanism for its mains-powered Tapo cameras and is candid that rain causes a significant change in the image and that this kind of detection cannot be avoided; its battery models with a built-in PIR sensor, the C400, C420 and C425, avoid most of those false triggers. A heat-based camera wants something warm crossing its view instead, and Blink puts best detection across its whole range at two to six metres, with a response out to about ten. A rocket over the next street is nowhere near that, which is why one house can sit quiet all evening while next door fills up with clips.

The thumbnails settle which you have, and they sort the night for you. Flash-lit clips are uniformly bright for a fraction of a second with nothing moving in the foreground, and they arrive in clusters rather than at random. What deserves opening is the odd one out: a person at the edge of frame, a clip starting with a vehicle door, anything late on once the noise has died down.

Smoke, drizzle and infrared glare

The hard problem is the infrared illuminator. It throws light forward, smoke and fine rain near the lens bounce it back, and the frame washes out white. TP-Link says unwanted detections are more likely in night vision mode with the infrared light on. Blink does tell you to turn off the Recording LED and the Night Vision IR LED to prevent glare from reflected light, but that advice is written for the Mini shooting through a window pane, and neither company publishes a fix for smoke. So the answer is placement: a camera under a porch, shooting along a wall rather than into open air, keeps the smoke out of the near field.

The triggers that are not false positives

Wind-blown decorations are the quiet one: bunting or a loose recycling bag moves all evening and registers on both sensor types, and Blink notes that infrared sensors respond to groups of motion such as blowing leaves or rain. Ten minutes clearing the porch beats any slider.

Animals are why we would not simply wind the sensitivity down. The RSPCA reports that almost two thirds of dog owners responding to its 2025 Savanta fireworks poll said their dog had been negatively affected by fireworks, which it puts at 60% of dogs in distress. A cat going through the flap at speed is exactly the alert you want tonight. Narrow the area the camera watches instead, using the detection or activity zone in its app. A person-only filter is the other route, and step 2 sets out what it costs; Ring, Arlo and Google Nest offer versions of it behind a subscription.

The bonfire period, day by day

The date most people plan around is one Thursday. The season is closer to four weeks. GOV.UK's selling rules give the shape of it: private sales from registered sellers run 15 October to 10 November, then 26 to 31 December, plus the three days before Diwali and Chinese New Year.

Mid October onwards: set up, do not silence

The first scattered bangs follow that 15 October sale date within days. Use those three weeks to find both controls and be sure you can tell them apart on a phone screen in the dark. Pull the detection zone up off the open sky and clear the porch, keeping the drive and its approach inside it, but leave notifications on: muting a week early is how people end up still muted at Christmas.

Thursday 5 November, from late afternoon

Mute before it starts, not after the twentieth notification. It is dark across the UK by late afternoon in early November and organised displays go off from around then. A timed control is still the one to use, because it cannot be left on for ever by accident, but take the longest duration your system offers and undo it yourself in the morning: the peak runs from dusk to late evening at the earliest, so a three hour snooze started at dusk expires with it still going.

Peak hours, and where the law actually stops

The rules are not the same across the four nations, and treating the England and Wales position as the UK position is the commonest mistake on this subject. GOV.UK says you must not set off fireworks between 11pm and 7am, with the cut-off extended to midnight on Bonfire Night and to 1am for New Year's Eve, Diwali and Chinese New Year. The Scottish Government's guidance is stricter: adult fireworks may only be used in private places between 6pm and 11pm, with those same later cut-offs, and councils can designate Firework Control Zones where fireworks must not be set off anywhere at any time, with category 1 items such as sparklers and party poppers, and organised public displays, excepted. In Northern Ireland, nidirect states that you must not possess, buy or use fireworks other than indoor fireworks and sparklers without a licence issued by the Department of Justice. The 2004 Regulations that set the 11pm, midnight and 1am cut-offs do not extend to Northern Ireland at all, so those times are not the position there.

None of that tells you when the noise stops, only when it becomes an offence, but in England, Wales and Scotland it does give you an end point for the mute: the cut-off where you live, plus half an hour. Northern Ireland has no equivalent statutory cut-off, so use the clock, not an alert list you have muted: set an alarm for late evening, check the app's event history then, and set a second for the morning in case you sleep through. Either way, come off snooze if you are up, and undo everything in the morning if you are not.

The weekend after, and New Year's Eve

The Thursday is not the busiest night everywhere. Displays cluster on the nearest weekend, the selling window runs to 10 November, and in 2026 Diwali falls on Sunday 8 November with its own 1am cut-off, so expect to run the routine twice more. It applies again on 31 December, where the noise concentrates around midnight rather than spreading across the evening, so the mute can start later rather than needing to run longer.

Setting it up, app by app

Steps one and two are done in advance, step three or step four on the afternoon, and step five is the one people skip.

1. Confirm you are actually recording. Ring notes that recording requires a Ring subscription, Blink needs a storage option before clips are saved, and eufy only records in a mode if Record Video is enabled in that mode's device rules. If that is not in place then nothing is being recorded on any night, and that, not the muting, is the thing to fix first. A doorbell writing to a card in the unit records regardless of what the notification settings say, though a detection or privacy switch still stops it, which is a good argument for a video doorbell with local SD card storage, and wired cameras feeding a recorder sit where phone settings cannot reach at all, part of why a wired backbone behaves differently.

2. Narrow where the camera looks, but not below what you would want on film. Pull the detection or activity zone up off the open sky and off anything you cannot move, and clear the porch of what you can. Keep the drive, its approach and the door inside the zone, and keep the roofline in if you would want a clip of a rocket landing there. If narrowing would cost you the approach, leave the zone alone and just mute the phone. Do not switch Motion Detection off instead: on most of these systems that is the switch that stops the recording. Tapo has one exception, and it is a loss rather than a free win: TP-Link lets you run Person Detection with basic motion detection switched off, so a person is still recorded but a car on the drive and a cat through the flap are not. Do that only if a person is the only thing you would ever need on film, and put it back in the morning.

3. Silence the phone, using the right control. These are the paths the manufacturers publish, so check them against your own app: several have been redesigned recently, and Ring carries a banner noting that some product names have changed. Motion alerts and doorbell presses are usually separate settings, and you only want the first one off. If the only control you can find is a single Notifications switch covering the whole account or device, it silences the doorbell press too, and someone at the door tonight gets nothing.

  • Ring. Tap the crescent moon icon at the top of the app, choose a Snooze Duration, tap Start Snooze; for one device, open the menu and tap the bell icon, which snoozes that device's motion alerts rather than its ring. Doorbell rings and Priority Alerts stay on either way, and on a Ring plan cameras keep recording.
  • Blink. Use Snooze, which runs 30 minutes, 1, 2, 3 or 4 hours, or up to 24 hours on a Blink Plus plan. Four hours is the ceiling without that plan, so a snooze started at dusk runs out mid-evening with the peak still going: set an alarm for then and start a second one. Clips still record and save if you have storage in place. Do not tap Disarmed at the bottom of the home screen.
  • Arlo. In the Arlo Secure app tap your profile icon, then Notifications, then toggle Notifications off under your Location and choose 30 minutes, 1 hour, 3 hours or 24 hours. An older app build puts the same control under Settings, then Mute Notifications. Arlo says this affects all devices on that account and Location, so a tablet, a second phone, or a relative checking in on the same account all go quiet for as long as the mute runs. Arlo also says Critical Alerts, which are not enabled by default, cannot be muted and will override it. Take 24 hours rather than 3, since three hours started at dusk runs out with the peak still going, then undo it by hand in the morning as step 5 says.
  • Tapo and Kasa. Two levels, and tonight you want the lower one. Device level is the gear icon on the live view, then Device Settings, then Notifications, where Activity Notifications switches off. Account level is Me, then Notifications, then Device Notifications and Management, but that one covers every Tapo device on the account, so a Tapo doorbell goes quiet with the cameras.
  • Google Nest. In the Google Home app tap Home, then All devices, then touch and hold the device tile, then Settings, then Notifications. Restrict which activity types alert you rather than turning push notifications off for the whole device: Google lets you turn the seen event types on or off individually. A few alerts cannot be switched off at all, including the camera going offline or detecting tampering.
  • eufy. Do not change mode tonight. Open the Security tab, tap the mode you are already in, and turn Push Notification off inside it: eufy sets that per mode, so the phone goes quiet without touching detection or recording. Switching to Home mode also goes quiet, but eufy only records in that mode if Record Video is enabled in its device rules, so it is not the route to take in a hurry.

4. Or silence it at the phone instead. An iOS Focus or Android Do Not Disturb mutes the app without touching a single camera setting, which makes it the one route that cannot cost you a recording. Pick this or step 3, not both, and give it a fixed length rather than a repeating nightly schedule. The trade is real: it silences a doorbell press too, so someone knocking for help gets nothing, and a bypass only helps if it was set up beforehand. Ring says alerts not selected for Priority Alerts stay hidden in Do Not Disturb mode, and Google says critical alerts break through only once you have turned them on. Arlo cuts the other way, but only once you turn it on: it says Critical Alerts are not enabled by default, and that they then override Mute, Silent Mode and Do Not Disturb.

5. Turn it back on the next morning. Reverse everything you changed, not only the mute: the notification control from step 3, a person-only filter above all, any mode you switched, and Ring's Motion Frequency if you dropped it. The detection zone can stay pulled in until the season is over. If you used step 4, end the Focus or Do Not Disturb first or it will swallow the test. Ring snoozes and the shorter Blink ones lapse on their own. A 24 hour mute, whether Arlo's or a Blink Plus snooze, will not lapse until the same time tomorrow evening, so undo those by hand in the morning. The Tapo, Google Nest and eufy routes are plain toggles that stay off until you undo them. Then prove it: walk across the camera's view and wait for the notification. A camera you believe is watching the drive and is not is worse than one you know is muted.

Where this goes wrong, and how to recover

You stopped detection and lost the footage. There is no recovery for a clip that was never recorded. Check whether a wired recorder, a card in the unit or a neighbour's camera covers the same window, then switch detection back on before anything else.

The schedule persisted. This is the failure that costs weeks rather than one night. Ring's troubleshooting says that if Modes or Motion Schedules are enabled there may be times when motion detection is turned off, and lists deleting your schedules among the fixes for missed events. Check those settings in November, not January.

Switching Tapo modes wiped your per-device settings. TP-Link is explicit that switching to Home Mode or Away Mode overwrites the current detection, alarm and notification settings on every device added to that mode. Build the mode once with the settings you want, then switch modes rather than adjusting cameras individually.

The footage you did keep is unusable. Smoke and drizzle in the infrared near field wash out the frame and there is nothing to undo. Clean the lens cover, and move the camera under cover before next year.

Your battery camera died at 10pm. A night of continuous triggering is the heaviest load a battery device sees. Ring exposes a Motion Frequency setting that trades responsiveness for battery life. Dropping it for the evening will get the camera through, but it means longer gaps between recordings, so add it to the list you put back in the morning.

Frequently asked questions

Should I just turn my doorbell off for the night?

No. Bonfire Night is one of the nights you are most likely to want the footage, for a stray rocket on the roof or a damaged car. Turning the camera off, disarming it or switching on a privacy mode removes the recording with the noise. Silence the notification instead.

What time do fireworks have to stop in the UK?

That depends which nation you are in, and there is no single UK answer. GOV.UK gives an 11pm to 7am ban with the cut-off extended to midnight on Bonfire Night and 1am for New Year's Eve, Diwali and Chinese New Year. Scotland is stricter, allowing adult fireworks in private places only between 6pm and 11pm with those same later cut-offs, and Northern Ireland requires a licence from the Department of Justice, with the 11pm to 7am rule not extending there at all.

Will muting alerts stop my camera recording?

On the right control, no. Ring says that with a Ring plan cameras and doorbells continue to record events while Alerts Snooze is on, and Blink says cameras still record motion while Snooze is active if you have storage in place. The controls that do stop recording are named differently: Motion Detection, Disarmed, Standby, Privacy Mode, or turning the camera off. eufy is the exception to watch: its Home mode is quiet by default, but eufy says you have to enable Record Video in that mode to keep the recordings.

Can I set this to happen automatically every 5 November?

You can, and it is the change most likely to bite you later. Ring's own troubleshooting notes that if Modes or Motion Schedules are enabled there may be times when motion detection is turned off. A timed snooze expires by itself, but only Ring, Blink and Arlo offer one; a schedule, or a plain notification toggle, sits there until you remember it.