[Hai-users] can anyone explain this?

[Dave Harper]

  Joseph,

While I cannot comment on the specifics of your problem, there are a 
couple of comments I would like to make.

First, monitoring services - while generally good - are not perfect.  I 
once had a case where I was called to inform me that my alarm had gone 
off.  However, I was home at the time and had not armed the system at 
all that day.  Checking the event log afterwards did not give any hint 
of a problem.  While the monitoring service would not comment further on 
it, I suspect it was someone who had made a simple mistake.

Secondly, I have had a number of "legitimate" false alarms in the past.  
One of the more interesting occurred while I was visiting my parents in 
Florida over the Christmas holidays several years ago.  I got a call on 
my cell phone in the middle of the night that the alarm had gone off.  
Fortunately, my brother-in-law lives across the street and he was able 
to meet the police when they responded.  As he recounted it later, he 
and the cop stood on the upstairs balcony and watched while a moth, 
which had gotten into the house, circled around a ceiling motion 
detector and periodically set it off!  That one ended up costing me a 
really nice dinner at their favorite restaurant 8-).

I finally decided to try and make the burglar trigger more robust.  
Today I have things set up so that it takes a breach of a perimeter zone 
(door, window, glass break, etc.) followed within a five minute window 
by a trigger from one of the interior sensors (motion detector, door 
which is supposed to be closed, etc.) before the actual alarm is 
triggered.  Since I switched to this scheme, I have yet to have a false 
alarm.

Regard,
Dave