Finally learned how to stop motion sensors from false alarms in hallways after way too many repeat visits.

4 comments

4 Comments

Yeah, my buddy had a similar mess with his... he mounted his sensor right over a heating vent and it went off every twenty minutes like clockwork. He spent weeks thinking it was a wiring fault or a bad unit before he caught the warm air puffing the curtains. Ended up moving it to the opposite wall and tilting it away from the vent, and that finally did the trick. He said the worst part was explaining to his wife why he was crawling around the hallway at midnight checking the thermostat.

tessap971mo ago

Angle them slightly downward so they only see the lower half of the hallway. I mean, the main thing for me was pets and air currents from vents, so this helped a ton. I also moved mine higher up on the wall, like seven feet, and pointed them in a more vertical line. Then I just walked by a bunch of times to test the new detection pattern. That finally fixed the false alarms from our cat and the AC kicking on.

thompson.julia1mo ago

Actually, angling them down too much can miss important coverage at chest height. @tessap97's tip on mounting height is solid, but the angle part is a bit tricky if you still need to catch a person walking. You really just want to avoid pointing it directly at the vent or a sunny window.

casey2681mo ago

Oh, I learned that the hard way when I pointed my camera too low and it started alerting me every time my dog walked by, but only from the neck down. Looked like a headless ghost dog on the feed, which was creepy and useless. Had to redo the whole thing after realizing I missed all the important stuff. Now I keep it higher up and test it by walking around like a weirdo in my own hallway. Still get the occasional false alarm from the AC, but at least I can see people's faces now. My setup is basically a tribute to trial and error.