Rolled up on a service call in Phoenix last week where the panel was beeping every 30 seconds

Turns out the homeowner's cat had been sleeping on the keypad and somehow triggered a tamper condition I'd never seen before. Has anyone else run into weird false alarms from pets messing with the hardware?

2 comments

2 Comments

anthony42626d agoMost Upvoted

No kidding, I had almost the exact same thing happen with a customer's Maine Coon. That thing was a solid 18 pounds and it walked across the keypad and somehow locked the whole system into a silent alarm condition. Took me an hour to figure out why the panel was showing a trouble code that didn't even match the manual. The owner was just standing there like "Oh yeah, Mittens does that sometimes." I'm with you completely, a decent panel should be able to handle a cat stepping on it without going haywire. Have you ever seen one where the cat actually chewed through the wires yet?

paul_mason1227d ago

Oh come on. A cat sleeping on the keypad setting off a tamper condition sounds like one of those stories a tech tells to justify billing an extra hour. If your system can't handle a 10 pound cat leaning on it, the real problem is the cheap hardware, not the pet.