It was about 9:30 Sunday evening when a text message arrived on my iPhone saying a motion detector in our living room, part of the SimpliSafe alarm system installed several months ago, had just been triggered.

We weren’t home, far from it.

We were 4,400 miles away in a hotel room in Auckland, New Zealand, where it was Monday evening, local time. Meda had finished the first day of a three-day conference, we had eaten dinner, and were in our room watching the news of the day.

Then the alert arrived.

What happened next was a lesson in how well the internet overcomes time and distance.

The protocol is simple. When a sensor is triggered, an alarm sounds in the house. About a minute later, the alarm goes to the call center of a monitoring company somewhere on the U.S. mainland. They then attempt to telephone me to determine whether it is indeed an emergency. If I’m not available, or fail to provide them a single “safe word” needed to call off the alert, then HPD is immediately notified of a possible break-in and asked to respond.

The whole process doesn’t take long, and I knew that telephone call would be coming shortly.

At least I hoped it would come, although I wasn’t sure how well the system would cope with our international travel.

I grabbed the MacBook Air that we travel with and quickly did two things.

First, I got online and went to the dashboard of my SimpliSafe account, where I could check to see whether any other sensors had also been triggered. It so, that would confirm that we weren’t dealing with a false alarm.

In this case, though, nothing else had been detected. None of the doors had been opened, and other motion detectors were silent. That’s good.

Then I quickly accessed one of the two cameras that scan the living room. There was no sign of movement. Then Ms. Annie, one of our cats, wandered through the room, looking over to where the alarm was sounding. But she wasn’t acting as she likely would if a stranger had just entered the house, another good sign.

That’s when the call came from the monitoring company. The caller identified himself, and asked whether an emergency response was required.

Based on available evidence gathered from our hotel thousands of miles away, I quickly provided the “safe word” and called off the alert, thinking that I could continue to monitor from a distance and call HPD myself later if necessary.

I checked a second camera, which showed that windows used in an earlier burglary had not been opened, another good sign.

Then I made a quick call to friends who live nearby, using Skype over the hotel’s wifi connection and asked if they would do a quick check of the house. They agreed. I continued monitoring via the living room camera, and saw their flashlights outside when they arrived. Again, they didn’t see anything to indicate a break-in, and I didn’t see anything suspicious inside.

So in about 10 minutes, the action was over. The SimpliSafe system was rearmed, and we could relax.

It was a pretty impressive example of how well this “install-it-yourself” system functions.

If my cell phone had been turned off, the monitoring company wouldn’t have reached me and police would have automatically been called. Luckily, that wasn’t the case.

For now, I don’t know what set off the false alarm of that one sensor. Troubleshooting that will have to await our return to Hawaii when Meda’s conference is over.