Dual tech motion detectors
Andrew Gabriel
motion detectors. I've tried a few now, so I thought I would pass
back my own feedback on how those compare. These are all wall or
corner mounting wired units.
Focus Dual-tech
This has the widest coverage of any of the detectors I tried,
easily more than 90 degrees horizontal and excellent look-down.
For at least some faults in the unit, the tamper contacts are
opened, i.e. in addition to being wired to the case contacts,
the detector part of the circuit can also open them when some
faults are detected. The unit contains two LEDs to indicate if
the PIR and/or microwave detector are detecting movement, but
unfortunately the encoding for this signaling is ridiculasly
complex (why didn't they just use one for PIR and the other
for microwave, rather than various flashing/steady indications?)
The LEDs can be disabled by jumper, but cannot be remotely
enabled/disabled.
Unfortunately, the unit contains an undocumented anti-masking
feature with no means to disable it, and this rendered 9 of
the 10 units I installed completely useless, even on minimum
microwave setting. The anti-masking detector opens the tamper
contacts, and will not reset until the unit sees PIR movement.
Remote reset could probably be done by power cycling the unit
where the panel has suitable capability (used with some smoke
detectors I believe), although power cycling units which haven't
locked up will also operate their tamper contacts momentarily
(since loss of power very sensibly causes a tamper alarm).
Were it not for this undocumented anti-masking feature, this
unit would have been the overall winner for me.
Pyronix Equinox 10
This unit is struggling to reach 90 degrees horizontal coverage,
and has no lookdown capability. However, it was more sensitive
than the Focus Dual-tech at distance. It has 3 LEDs to clearly
indicate PIR, Microwave, and alarm triggered, although at the
limit of its range your eyesight is going to have to be good
to distinguish them. Some light spill from one LED to another
didn't help, but was improved by sleeving the LEDs on the circuit
board. The LEDs can be disabled by jumper, but cannot be remotely
enabled/disabled. As far as I could tell, the tamper contacts are
connected to the case switch only and not used to signal any
other error conditions. This unit does not contain masking
detection, but a similar unit is available which does.
Guardall Astra Micra S-8
This unit manages 90 degree coverage, and has good lookdown
capability (comes with a pet-alley mask if you don't want that).
However, even using the 'C' setting (for best nearby verses long
distance PIR coverage), I found most of the units still needed
to be angled down slightly. One comment I would make is that
different units seemed to have different optimal coverage patterns
and some swapping of units in different positions was done to get
specific units into the locations which suited them best. The
units can be jumper set to 4 or 8m microwave coverage, but one
unit had to be set to 8m to work in a room only 4m diagonal,
whilst another had no problems picking up small movements at the
opposite corner of a 7m diagonal room. The unit had no problem
looking at an open fire (whereas the Focus dual-tech was triggered
by the fire) - of course, such positioning is not a good idea
anyway;-0 The unit contains only a single LED, so you can't tell
when only one of the PIR or microwave are being triggered, which
is a bit silly given they are separately adjustable. Also, the LED
isn't very visible in high ambient lighting levels. The LED can be
disabled by jumper, and can be remotely enabled/disabled. As far
as I could tell, the tamper contacts are connected to the case
switch only and not used to signal any other error conditions.
As far as I know, this unit does not contain masking detection.
I hope someone finds this write-up useful. This was the sort of
thing I was looking for when choosing appropriate devices, but
couldn't find anywhere.
--
Andrew Gabriel And...@cucumber.demon.co.uk
Consultant Software Engineer