Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 316 posts

Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

#91

Post by bshep »

tfha wrote: post #33
Namrog84 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it just me who'd love something like this to happen to me? I love reading about interesting problems and creative ways to solve them. I used to wish for the same. But then I was given a super annoying one. In my apartment I heard this beep about once every 90 seconds or so. I tried ignoring it for a while hoping it'd go away. And just so at the right frequency and infrequent enough Impossible to determine direct…

We had a fire alarm going off due to low battery once. We searched the house for 3 hours trying to find it. Gave up, slept through the beeping. Next day, enraged, we tried again. Eventually we found it in the bathroom trash can.

My house has 6 fire alarms, when they beep there is NO way to tell which one it is making the noise 2/2 the combination of short beep and irregular beeping interval.

My solution is to just change all the batteries at once so i dont have to guess (and if you guess wrong you then you wont sleep tomorrow because of the beeping)

I wish there was some visual indicator to tell which one was faulty.

Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

#92

Post by udaciousmark »

This makes me wonder if anyone has thought to add microphones yet to the array of sensors an autonomous car uses. Things like "my neighbors alarm keeps going off when I go into reverse" and "there is an ambulance somewhere I cannot see yet" sound mighty useful (well, at least the latter example), but very hard to incorporate.

Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

#93

Post by dghughes »

monk_e_boy wrote: post #31
lb1lf wrote: post #11

Is it just me who'd love something like this to happen to me? Would be great fun tracking down the source of the problem (if it was my car; probably less so if I was in the house...) There's a lot of options to try to isolate the problem, just thinking out loud here - a) Back into the driveway returning from work. See if alarm goes off. Next morning, see if alarm goes off as you drive out. b) Remove fuse for reverse…

Time for my story. I was a noobie computer programmer in my first job. After being there for a few months my mouse started to have issues. It stuttered and refused to move correctly. So I'd take the little grey ball out and clean it and it'd be OK again. But the next day it'd do it again. So I ended up with the cleanest fucking mouse on planet earth. Yet every so often it'd stop working... on parts of the screen. Oth…

I recall a story on reddit's talesfromtechsupport a printer would stop working at a certain time of day. I think it was near a skylight or something weird. I have no idea what it was about but your story jogged my memory but not enough to remember it all.

Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

#94

Post by post_break »

When I worked at an NOC for a fairly large ISP they told me a story of an intermittent outage that occurred randomly on weekends. Something was injecting insane amounts of RF interference on the lines. They tracked it down to the node, then the neighborhood. And then finally they found the culprit. What was knocking the network out of whack? It was some guys edge trimmer. The motor in it was injecting crazy signals somehow. The ISP bought him a new trimmer and promptly took pictures of this one and destroyed it. Never had an issue with RF again.

Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

#97

Post by ww520 »

alister wrote: post #71

Along the same lines, I had a hell of a time tracking down the reason my washroom GFI (ground fault interrupter) tripped on random occasions; i.e., the electric outlet would lose power and need to be reset. It turned out that an iPhone receiving a phone call tripped it -- even before it starts to ring! Making a phone call didn't do anything. Here's a 13-second video: https://vimeo.com/247730625 I'd love to hear comme…

I would guess it's probably your phone's speaker. As the call coming in, the phone fires up the speaker for ringing. The speaker induces a current.

GFCI works by detecting the difference in the current flowing between the hot wire and the neutral wire. It needs to work very fast (to avoid the human touching the wire getting electrocuted) so any slight difference in current would trip it off. The current induce by your phone's speaker probably causes enough difference in the current to trip it off.

You can run an experiment by turning off your phone's speaker for incoming call. See if the speaker is the culprit.

Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

#98

Post by dawnerd »

bshep wrote: post #91
tfha wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a fire alarm going off due to low battery once. We searched the house for 3 hours trying to find it. Gave up, slept through the beeping. Next day, enraged, we tried again. Eventually we found it in the bathroom trash can.

My house has 6 fire alarms, when they beep there is NO way to tell which one it is making the noise 2/2 the combination of short beep and irregular beeping interval. My solution is to just change all the batteries at once so i dont have to guess (and if you guess wrong you then you wont sleep tomorrow because of the beeping) I wish there was some visual indicator to tell which one was faulty.

I believe they all beep because they want you to replace all the batteries.

I had this happen a few months ago except it wasn't a low battery alarm. It kept yelling "FIRE FIRE" but then turning off. Of course FirstAlert apparently doesn't indicate which alarm is causing it. They say the initiating one flashes a different pattern but I didn't find one. Ended up, after getting no sleep at all, replacing all 9 of them with nests. At least then if one fails I'll know which one.

Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

#99

Post by dawnerd »

mrmondo wrote: post #88

Used to set off car alarms all the time when I had ‘quite hotted up’ Type R Integra years ago, never house alarms though I think. I’m willing to be the guy/gal next door has those broken window alarm strips installed, one part of the strip is loose and when the cars RPM drops as the clutch is let out while in reverse it slightly vibrates the window causing the contact to short (or break) and thus the house alarm goes…

Very likely. My neighbors son has a loud as hell car and it definitely rattles my windows even when in idle.

Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

#100

Post by [deleted] »

verelo wrote: post #34
Namrog84 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it just me who'd love something like this to happen to me? I love reading about interesting problems and creative ways to solve them. I used to wish for the same. But then I was given a super annoying one. In my apartment I heard this beep about once every 90 seconds or so. I tried ignoring it for a while hoping it'd go away. And just so at the right frequency and infrequent enough Impossible to determine direct…

Had a near identical issue 3 years back in my apartment! After tracking the source (ear on walls, floor and just figuring out where it was) i ended up discovering it was an alarm in the mechanical room below my apartment. There was a crack in the heat exchanger and it was a CO alarm, the disturbing part (lost sleep aside) was that my complaint about the sound is what alerted the building to the issue, and worse yet,…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN