That week in 2017 when every single panel had a false alarm issue

I swear I had the worst week of my career back in June of 2017 out in Phoenix. Every system I touched that week, maybe 7 or 8 residential installs, kept throwing false alarms from motion detectors. I chased my tail for three days swapping out PIRs, checking wiring, even replacing batteries on a DSC panel that had been solid for years. Turned out the whole neighborhood was getting blasted by afternoon sun reflecting off a new solar farm about a mile away. The light was hitting the sensors at just the right angle to trip them around 4 PM every day. I had to go back to each house and swap the motion detectors for dual-tech units that filter out that kind of interference. Has anyone else dealt with a weird environmental factor like that messing with your installs?

2 comments

2 Comments

alicem299d ago

Hated that solar farm issue too, wasted a whole day on one house before figuring it out.

logan_dixon188d ago

Disagree completely with @alicem29 on this one. Those solar farm issues were a blessing in disguise for me because I got to actually see how the load balancing worked when you had a big system pulling from the grid. Spent half a day on that first house and learned more about the interplay between solar and the main panel than I had in months of simple installs. My second house with the same problem took maybe two hours because I knew what to look for. Sometimes the hard jobs teach you more than the easy ones ever will, even if you curse them at the time.