Rant: Found out why my panel kept false alarming after dark

It took me three nights of swapping sensors in a house outside Austin before I realized the homeowner had a new LED security light shining right into the motion detector, so check the ambient light levels before you mount anything or you'll chase your tail for hours.

2 comments

2 Comments

craig.parker7d ago

You mentioned "check the ambient light levels" but that's not quite the whole story... it's more about the light spectrum than just brightness. LED security lights pump out a ton of infrared that many motion sensors pick up as heat, tricking them into false alarms. So you gotta check both the light level AND what kind of light it is before you mount anything.

dakotawells7d ago

Yeah, "check both the light level AND what kind of light it is" really hits on something bigger. It feels like everything in life is like that now - you can't just look at one thing and call it good. Like setting up a smart thermostat, you gotta think about the room layout and the sun coming through the windows, not just the temp number. Or even with food labels, people see "low fat" and think it's healthy, but then you look at the sugar and it's through the roof. It's like we're all learning the hard way that the easy answers are usually missing something important.