The day a squirrel set off every motion sensor in a 12-unit building

Got a frantic call from a property manager in Springfield about a full system alarm at their new apartment block, with every single zone showing motion. Rushed over expecting the worst, only to find a very angry, very lost gray squirrel bouncing off the walls in the main hallway. It took me, the manager, and a guy from the landscaping crew with a broom about twenty minutes to guide it back outside. Has anyone else had a small animal cause a total system meltdown?

3 comments

3 Comments

mason.cole2mo ago

Honestly makes you wonder how many "ghost" signals or false alarms are just critters we never see. That system probably logged a full scale human invasion in its event history, all from like eight ounces of panicked rodent. Bet the sensor calibration is set for something way bigger than a squirrel, which is kinda wild if you think about it.

park.wyatt2mo ago

Was it a new system? Because @mason.cole is totally right about the calibration. We had a moth hatch inside a wall-mounted sensor at my old condo, and it just kept fluttering right in front of the lens. The log showed constant motion in the laundry room for three days straight until someone finally opened it up.

victor_carter511mo ago

Hang on, you guys are way too quick to blame the hardware or the animals. What if the system is actually picking up exactly what it's supposed to, and people just refuse to believe their own logs? A three day constant motion alert in a laundry room, that's not a bug or a calibration error, that's the sensor doing its job perfectly. Maybe something was actually there the whole time, just not something you could see with your eyes. We trust these things to catch a person sneaking around at night, but we laugh off the same data when it doesn't match our idea of what a threat looks like.