PIRs for house with ceiling heating & cooling vents and "pets"!

eddy · 2007-10-24T12:39:00+00:00

I recently had an alarm system installed, consisting of a NX-16 panel,magnetic reeds on all doors and DSC encore PIRs in the main livingareas. The PIRs, according to the installer are immune to small pets.In my case the pets consist of one 12kg Cavalier King charles spanielwho spends all his time sleeping and a 8kg, 15 year old cat who sleepseven more! Then there are the 2 Roomba discovery automatic vacuumcleaners, dinner plate size gadgets who run around the house atregular intervals sucking up debris.However, it was not this collection of pets who appear to have causedthe problem. I also have heating and cooling ducts in the ceilingbecause the house is all on one level and built on a concrete slab. Atthe moment, because it's still early spring here, the heatingoccasionally comes on at 6.30pm. Because I sometimes get home onlyafter 7.30pm, the heating has been running for around an hour. Overthe last 8 weeks, practically every PIR in the house has falsed atleast once after 6.30pm. Some of the heating ducts are within 3 ft ofthe PIR.To be absolutely sure, I have actually "banished" the pets from thehouse, but the false alarms still continue.To make matters worse, even if I did disable the timers that operatethe thermostat, my heating unit is a ceiling mounted model which has afan controller that is triggered by the ambient temperature inside theunit. In days that are hot enough, the heat in the roof is actuallyhigh enough to trick the fans into coming on, which in turns causeswarm air to circulate into the house. And this has caused at least onefalse alarm ...In a situation like mine, are there PIRs which are capable of handlingthe disturbance from the heating ducts, or is the only option to havethe PIRs removed from the security system ?rgds, Ed

Oct 24, 2007 40 Replies

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Frank Olson 18 years ago

I'm sure you do.

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