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Saturday, December 19th, 2020 12:23 AM

Low battery causes alarm, system resets itself?

I just had an alarm from a motion sensor. It's in a locked office so I'm pretty darn sure nothing caused a real motion alarm. Cops showed up 1/2 hour later (I checked my cameras) and left when they saw there was no break-in. I showed up 40 minutes after the alarm and the system was still set, I entered my code and turned it off. Called SimpliSafe back and they said yes, there was a motion alarm. I tell them it was a false alarm.

Transferred me to technical service where the guy had a very hard time understanding me, and I him. He was fading in and out and had a heavy accent. Gave him my company email and he kept telling me it had to have gmail, or yahoo on it...weird. So I gave him my phone number instead and he was able to look at my account. Then he says my camera needs a new battery...the SS camera doesn't have a battery... So I told him the motion sensor had an alarm, he says ok. Shouldn't he be able to see that? He's looking at my account while I'm talking to him, 45 minutes after a dispatch. So I said would a low battery on the motion sensor cause an alarm, he says "Yes". It seems he's just eager to agree with anything.

Check my system and the status on the motion detector is "OK".

So, can a low battery cause a motion detection? How often do batteries need to be changed? I just checked it and the 3.0V battery had a reading of 3.1V, so it wasn't the battery.

Community Admin

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554 Messages

4 years ago

Hi @greg_111,

To keep it simple, no, a low battery cannot cause a Motion Sensor to trigger an alarm. Generally though, the batteries in your sensors should last about three years before needing to be replaced. Motion Sensors are slightly more prone to false alarms than our other sensors simply because of the way that they work.

Technically speaking, SimpliSafe Motion Sensors don't actually detect motion; they are PIR motion sensors which means that they actually detect heat. It's the sudden change in the amount of heat that the sensor "sees" that will trigger the alarm e.g. when someone walks in front of a motion sensor, there will suddenly be a lot more heat that it "sees" setting off the alarm.

With regards to your other question about the system being armed when you arrived on the premises, that is because once the siren on your SimpliSafe system has stopped blaring, the system will automatically re-arm itself to make sure that the property is still protected.

SimpliSafe Social Team
SimpliSafe Home Security

3 Messages

4 years ago

I understand about the reset and think it's a good feature. However, my system, since the time of purchase, has twice (in the wee morning hours, no less) given a false positive panic alarm that we can only attribute to dying or dead batteries. The first time we were sleeping and the second time we were out of state. No panic alarm was intentionally triggered by a human, therefore, and we do not have any pets. No one broke in.

Both times it was a keypad. Replaced the batteries, and there weren't any more issues. Hard to believe it was any other reason.

Community Admin

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554 Messages

4 years ago

Hi @ssarfati,

As it's not possible for low batteries to cause an alarm to trigger, it seems more likely that there may be an issue with the Panic Button on the Keypad itself. We'll make sure to have one of our Specialists follow up with you to make sure you don't have this issue again going forward.

SimpliSafe Social Team
SimpliSafe Home Security
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