A false alarm at the big bank on Main Street made me rethink my whole sensor setup

The motion detector kept going off because of a heating vent draft, and I had to explain to the manager why his system was crying wolf at 2 AM. What's your go-to fix for a drafty room that keeps setting off PIRs?

3 comments

3 Comments

thomas2911mo ago

Yeah, angling the sensor is just putting a hat on a broken roof. I had the same thing with a window unit AC blasting right across a sensor path. My fix was to get one of those cheap foam pipe insulators from the hardware store, the split kind, and wrap it around the vent edge to direct the air straight down. It stops that random puff from hitting the sensor dead on. Works way better than cardboard.

ericp672mo ago

Tape a piece of cardboard over the vent to block the draft directly. Then just angle the sensor away from that spot.

leoshah2mo ago

But what if the cardboard just moves the draft to a worse spot, @ericp67? Angling the sensor feels like a band-aid for a bigger problem.