BE WARY OF WINDY DAYS

We’ve had a number of gusty days recently, which can cause problems for our clients. Here are a few tips to prevent false alarms, and/or lots of unwanted beeping from your system:A mini glossary before we get started:

Chime: a feature of many (but not all) systems, in which the system will beep two times when a door or window is opened or closed. This is a favorite feature of parents of small children. (Click on System Help for assistance with turning this feature on or off).

Contact: a two -piece device, often embedded into the frames of your doors and windows. When the door or window is closed, the pieces of the contact are intact. When the door or window is opened, the pieces of the contact separate, which will trigger your alarm when the system is armed. The separation of the contact will also activate the chime feature (if it is “turned on” on your system).

Zone: the collective term for all doors and windows that have a contact.

  • Remember, “closed is not latched.” If a contact is connected when your alarm is set, your system will not alert you of an open zone at that time. However, if the window or door is not completely closed, and the wind kicks up, it can easily separate the contact on the unlatched door or window, thus triggering your alarm.
  • Those same unlatched zones can cause intermittent beeping of the chime feature every time the wind pushes the unlatched zone open or closed. Clients sometimes feel as though the system is “broken” or “going crazy.” If you are hearing what seems like very random beeping (two beeps at a time), go to your keypad to see which zone is open.
  • Keep in mind that it doesn’t have to be a windy day for unlatched zones to seemingly randomly activate the chime feature. A vacuum condition can do this as well, often times with an unlatched interior garage door. Again, if you hear random (when nobody is opening or closing zones) chime beeping (two beeps at a time), check your keypad for the open zone.

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