IT Blog Today

I have an unheated enclosed breezeway between my house and garage. I know the previous owners of my house had a break in. They had an ADT alarm system installed after the break in. I know that my breezeway would provide a burglar with excellent cover when trying to break into my home. This made me very paranoid. I purchased the Skylink HA-318 Motion Alert to let me know if anyone enters my breezeway. I love this product. I think I have only received one false alert in the past three months. An extremely rare false alarm is no bid deal to me.

I had high hopes for this device, as one of the cheapest motion alert systems out there which supports multiple zones. I bought several of these devices to help monitor various properties (4 receivers and 7 detectors).

For the most part, the product is pretty easy to configure and detects motion well. The critical problem for me was that out of the 7 detectors, 3 of them were defective in terms of giving off random false alarms, several times per day. (The other 4 worked perfectly.) At first I thought it must be due to the detectors being overly sensitive to shadows or insects or something, but then I put all of the detectors in a closed shoebox for several days as a test, and these 3 still gave off occasional false alarms, so they were defective.

I'd recommend going with one of the slightly more expensive alternatives such as the RWA-300R Reporter, or if cost is no object, the Optex Annunciator.

I used to have two dogs roamimg around the backyard all the time. They both passed away. So, I bought six HA-318T around the house such that I know where I need to pay attention, especially in the evening. The receiver can be put reasonable far away from the sensor, even with several walls in between. But it takes time to complete the handshaking when reset, probably 10 miniutes. So be patient. The sensor sometimes is too sensitive. If there is tree in the area, you definitely need to set the sensitivity to low. Once you set it to low, the sensing range is about 20-25 ft only. I guess this is the problem when powered by battery. My AC motion detect outdoor lights can sense as far as 100 ft. I aimed the sensor to a small area with door or window instead of a huge backyard. There are false alarm in daytime but it never happen in nighttime, don't know why. May be flies or bees pasing by ? But setting sensitivity to low should resolve most of the issue. One afternoon, one of the sensor kept going off. I found there was a brown pine needle hanging over the roof. In general, I use this system combined with motion detect light. It works well so far.

3/12/2010, upgrade to 5 star. When sensor aims at bright white wall, you need to add a strip of tape to reduce the sensitivity. otherwise, it works very well.