The difference six months and a faulty door sensor made on one customer's call history

I had this one customer in Phoenix who was getting false alarms like clockwork every Tuesday around 3 PM. For months I kept swapping out panels, checking wiring, even replaced the battery backup twice. Nothing stuck. Then last week I finally noticed the front door sensor was misaligned by maybe a quarter inch because the door frame had warped in the summer heat. After I shimmed it straight, the weekly calls just stopped. That was five false alarms a month for half a year, all because the sensor was seeing the door as open when the sun hit the frame just right. Has anyone else run into weird timing like that where a sensor acts up only at a specific time of day?

3 comments

3 Comments

danielm8015d ago

Honestly, I gotta push back a little on the timing thing. It wasn't the time of day that was the real problem, it was the sun hitting the frame at that exact angle when the temps peaked. The time was just a coincidence because that's when the heat distortion showed up. You fixed it by finding the warped frame, not because you solved some weird time-based glitch. The sensor wasn't acting up on its own, it was just physically out of whack from the heat. So yeah, the timing was a clue, but the root cause was always that quarter inch misalignment from the sun baking the door.

the_holly15d ago

Did you try ice packs on the frame first?

shane_bell15d ago

Read somewhere that aluminum doors can expand up to a sixteenth of an inch in direct sun, so that tracks perfectly.