Cats And Alarms

Big Nasty

Hi All,

Just adopted 2 cats from DSPCA. They are quite young and will spend much of the day indoors during the week. What I was wondering was will setting our house alarm (which has infra-red motion detectors) be affected by the cats moving around the house?

Thanks!

Heroditas

We constantly have issues with our Eircom alarm due to the two cats.
I think they set the alarm off when they jump at the patio window and disturb the long curtain/sideways blind we have across the window. That would certainly set it off.

The other prime suspect is when the postman drops a large load of post through the letterbox they charge at the door and jump up to try and whack the post as he's pushing it through. That might be also setting it off. Certainly there seems to be a strong correlation between lots of post and the alarm being activated.

Very embarrassing when eircom ring and ask if everyhting is ok and I say "no, it was the cats ..... again."

Very funny though watching them charge at the door when the postman is coming.

Big Nasty

So in a nutshell - yes, it does happen! Might have to get the infra-red disconnected then because an alarm is useless if it is going off constantly. Makes it a 'boy who cried wolf' scenario. There will still be the sensors on the windows and doors so I'm not too put out about it! Only picked them up last night, both kittens actually - 2 month old lad and his 9 month old mommy! The mommy is still settling in and was only neutered a week ago so is pretty quiet but the young lad is like someone doing Parkour on speed!

lrushe

Our cat will set off the alarm if she is left in when I go out so I usually put her out when I'm not there and she'll go and sleep with the dogs in their kennel or climb in the neighbours bedroom window (she leaves it open for our cat???) and sleep on her bed.

ciaranmc

When our cats at the front door and it doesnt have its handle pulled up to secure it on the bottom he can set it off my pulling the bottom of the door. so be watchfull of that if there's any play in the door at all

lauratkd

I have an option on my house alarm to just set the doors and windows (it's a night time setting) and if the cats are in, I use that one so they don't set off the sensor alarms. If anyone's gonig to break into the house, the alarm will go off but the cats haven't set it off yet!

Discodog

There are other options to PIR sensors such a beam breaks which can be set high enough to avoid the cat. Also the PIR can be mounted lower down with the bottom of the "beam" horizontal to the floor. Just make sure that it will not trigger if the cat gets up on furniture or sills.