PIRs and Animals

[bh00]

Hi,

How many of you have issues with your pets setting of the PIRs? I bought a PIR to play around with and setup a macro to turn on the kitchen lights when it detected motion, however the cat would set it off, so in the middle of the night the light might flick on, etc.

Now I know I could code it to only work between x and y hours but thats a bit of a rough way to do it.

Is there any installation tricks or special types of something to use to create it less likely to be set off by a pet?

Thanks,
BH

 

[electron]

I would think mounting the motion sensors about 4ft of the ground should do the trick. I would also check other motion sensors to see if there was actually someing approaching that one motion sensor, or if it was just the cat jumping up on something in front of that motion sensor. They also sell pet 'immune' motion sensors, but the good ones can be costly. Last but not least, if you have access to the the joists below the floors, you could install pressure sensors, which are also pet immune.

 

[SammyGCB]

How high is your motion? Motion detectors send beams down and around and the way we usually get around this is as the last comment started on, we mount them around 4-5ft upside down so all they see is that height and above. Downside is if you know this and crawl!

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

The pet immune motion detectors usually require an object larger than a typical pet (I believe they express the pet's size in pounds) to displace a heat change large enough to trip the motion detector. Some also have "mask off" areas to make them less sensitive to traffic around floor level.

BTW: Welcome to Cocoontech

 

[bsnedek]

Hello fellow newbie,
Depending on the type of pir you have. Try blinding it with black electric tape on the lens. You can experiment with height and width this way.



Ta Da
Brad

 

[jlehnert]

As mentioned below, many of the better PIRs include special cut tape to mask off various areas (in your case, the floor). The nice thing about this is because they are cut by the manufacturer, they can be applied pretty accurately. Also, as it is are mounted inside the PIR, the masking is not visible at all.

Hmmm. Maybe I should do a How-To on using masking in PIRs to add to BSRs alarm install Hot-To. Be a good excuse to get off my a** and finally do some masking that I've been meaning to do.