Last night while the system was in armed stay (via its nightly automation), we awoke to the siren going off due to the panel glass break sensor. I disarmed it and came to the conclusion that nothing bad had happened. Checked around the room, checked the cars, etc. It was clear that no glass was broken. A little spooked, she went back to bed and I followed suit after disabling panel glass in the installer settings (I wasn’t sure if this was going to be the opening salvo in a false-alarm spree and I wanted to sleep). I had a couple questions/concerns:
[EDIT: disregard, I did receive a call]This morning, I’m realizing that the panel never called anybody (monitoring/police) when the alarm went off. Or if it did, I was not aware of anything. Is there a way to check what happened there? I did put the panel in test mode a few days ago, but only for an hour, so it should have reverted.
Doing some reading online, my best guess is that my large dog must have somehow triggered the sensor to go off. I’ve been testing for a while and she hasn’t set it off until now, but it’s the only explanation I have.
The panel glass break sensor was set to low sensitivity before I disabled it. Is there any combination of other settings that could help prevent falsing? I’m considering leaving panel glass disabled after what happened, or only enabling it when in “armed away” status so it doesn’t wake us up at night (is that an option?). I left my other PowerG glassbreak sensors enabled and just disabled the offending sensor in the panel.
Happy to help! Looking into the event, according to monitoring history operators attempted to call two contacts on your list and left messages.
They received the disarm signal (referred to as an abort signal) at that time and the event was disregarded.
By default disarm events are accepted as proof of false alarm, to avoid unnecessary dispatch. Read more about this in the link below.
Is there any combination of other settings that could help prevent falsing? I’m considering leaving panel glass disabled after what happened, or only enabling it when in “armed away” status so it doesn’t wake us up at night (is that an option?).
Yes, I actually recommend programming glass break zones as away only most of the time, given the higher likelihood of false alarms due to activity in the home.
Use Sensor Group 17 for glass break zones you want to only trigger during arm away, instead of sensor group 13.
Dogs can be a common source of false alarms on glass breaks
Jason, thanks. I’m going to chalk this all up to user error, and it actually taught me something.
I had the glass break sensor on setting 13, I will reconfigure as setting 17 for armed away mode. I forgot that when I set it up originally, it would have monitoring call us first and then call the police, not directly call the police.
Then on top of that, I did in fact receive a call at the time of the alarm, but my phone was on DND and the caller ID for monitoring was not set to bypass DND, and I never saw a record of it until I checked missed calls. So this false alarm actually taught me a good lesson, I need to enable my phone to pass the Surety monitoring number caller ID through the DND setting on my phone somehow for next time around.
This was a good learning moment for me on how this thing works. Thank you! Now, if I can just get my dog to not set the alarm off…