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

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

#101

Post by [deleted] »

jbuzbee wrote: post #80
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…

Here's my odd story. Years ago, my wife and I were sleeping over at my parents house and we were awoken by garbled conversation from the clock radio. I sleepily checked it out and saw that the radio was turned off. Thinking that the on/off switch was broken, I just unplugged it. The garbled conversation continued. At this point I wondered if my parents house was built on top of an ancient burial ground... Talking to…

[deleted]

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

#102

Post by mdip »

Namrog84 wrote: post #18
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…

> 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…

Off topic to the discussion, but you hit on something that struck a nerve with me so I'm going to go with it . . .

Oh good God, this happens to me every time one of my smoke alarm batteries starts to go. I have 6 smoke detectors and an older home where they're not all wired/battery back-up but rather all battery powered.

The "chirp at 90 second interval" thing is the worst design in the universe and it bites me every time. If I didn't know any better -- since there is no clock device and these things are not networked in any way -- I'd swear they are also programmed to only start chirping between the hours of 2:00 AM and 4:00 AM. I've lived here 10 years. I have never had one of these fail in the morning, middle of the day or afternoon; only in the middle of the night. Hunting down the one of the six devices that is failing with its way-too-infrequent chirp that's so high-pitched, only a dog could figure out where it's coming from, is made extra fun when you're in the fantastic mood that being awoken from a pleasant dream in the middle of the night and have the joy of hunting it down in your boxers in a cold house.

How much more complicated would it have been to also include a visual indicator. The things have an LED on them that continues to blink as the battery dies. Why not also have it either stop blinking (to conserve battery) or blink faster -- anything to make it easier to identify which of the infernal, identical, devices is in need of a 9-volt.

Thankfully, they're due for replacement this year. Now I have to research which of the models that are available handle this circumstance with a little more intelligence (that don't cost a hundred bucks a pop). This is such an easy-to-solve problem -- I don't want a "smart smoke detector", I want a $25 one that A) detects smoke and B) reports when it needs other attention in a way that is useful. Heck, I'd pay an extra $10 for the latter feature even knowing it would cost them no more than the "dumb chirp" method.

There was a very bad house fire a few miles from me about a year ago and the person who lived there died in their sleep while the fire raged. The rumor was that the home had a bunch of smoke detectors without batteries in it and it was spread through our neighborhood as a "cautionary tale". I'm willing to bet there's a story of being woken up in the middle of the night for a battery change chirp in there somewhere.

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

#103

Post by macintux »

pcurve wrote: post #66
tgb wrote: post #20

What I would pay to hear this on Car Talk. Sigh.

sigh . I know... Skip to 18:50 and listen on for couple minutes. Love the caller complaining about his brother in law. https://play.podtrac.com/npr-510208/npr.mc.tritondigital.com...

That's great, and thanks, I had no idea about the implications of the oil light.

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

#105

Post by skookumchuck »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #89
remyp wrote: post #82

This reminds me of a “bug” I found when working for a company that sells package lockers to apartment buildings. We used iPads for the user interface and had monitoring in place to alert us if an iPad went offline. At only one location with two iPads one would go offline almost every day (but not every day) between 12pm and 1pm, for 10-20 minutes. Never the same time of day, and never the same length of time. It was…

I lived in an apartment in Fl and during the month of August and into September, every afternoon my cable would cut out for several hours. Happened every year for the three years I was there and only during that part of the year. Could never get Comcast to get a tech out there during the correct time frame, but they had a box mounted on one wall and that time of year it got direct sunlight and I suspect heat was to b…

I too had air temp heat related outages with Comcast. They finally dug up and replaced the equipment in the street.

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

#106

Post by mindcrime »

germinalphrase wrote: post #46
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…

My buddy's dad was an EE and built tiny devices made to create this exact situation. Easily hidable, they emitted a loud beep sound at a varying interval (~40-120 seconds). He called them Annoyers and would leave them behind pictures frames, in plants, etc. after parties.

This seems like a particularly evil variation of that idea:

http://www.goldmine-elec-products.com/prodinfo.asp?number=C6...

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

#107

Post by mindcrime »

jbuzbee wrote: post #80
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…

Here's my odd story. Years ago, my wife and I were sleeping over at my parents house and we were awoken by garbled conversation from the clock radio. I sleepily checked it out and saw that the radio was turned off. Thinking that the on/off switch was broken, I just unplugged it. The garbled conversation continued. At this point I wondered if my parents house was built on top of an ancient burial ground... Talking to…

It seems like a bit of a stretch, but in theory - depending on the details of the radio, and the power being emitted by the neighbor's station - you might be able to get some audio from a "powered off" radio. Maybe it's doing something like what happens when a crystal radio[1] absorbs enough power inductively to generate its audio.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio

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

#108

Post by amenghra »

mdip wrote: post #102
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…

Off topic to the discussion, but you hit on something that struck a nerve with me so I'm going to go with it . . . Oh good God, this happens to me every time one of my smoke alarm batteries starts to go. I have 6 smoke detectors and an older home where they're not all wired/battery back-up but rather all battery powered. The "chirp at 90 second interval" thing is the worst design in the universe and it bites me every…

When the battery is weak, fire alarms have a tendency to chirp in the middle of the night because lowered temperature affects the battery negatively.

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

#110

Post by jotux »

acranox wrote: post #2

I don’t know why, but my thought was the same as the third most voted comment in the thread too. The collision avoidance system, which I would have guessed was ultrasound, but the guy on reddit says it’s microwave. Either way, that could be picked up by some kind of sensors in a house alarm system. We live in a crazy world.

Motion detectors with microwave, especially residential sensors, don't use it as the sole detection method. It's always paired with passive infrared. Microwave interference doesn't really make any sense because he'd have to be tripping the infrared and microwave source at the same time.

Source: I wrote firmware for microwave/PIR motion detectors for a few years.

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