Caught a false alarm loop from a dying backup battery in 20 year old panel

Ran into a job last month where a house had been triggering false alarms every 3 days like clockwork. Customer said they already swapped motion sensors and even the panel board. I checked the voltage on the backup battery and it was 10.2 volts. Swapped it out for a fresh 12v 7ah and the false alarms stopped completely. Lesson I learned: always check the standby battery first on intermittent stuff. Have any of you seen weird issues from old batteries besides false alarms?

2 comments

2 Comments

piperr5820d agoMost Upvoted

yeah that low voltage thing is exactly what i ran into. had a system that would just go off at random times at night, drove the homeowner nuts. swapped the battery out and it was like 9.8 volts, barely holding anything. never would have guessed that would cause false alarms but apparently when the battery gets that dead it can mess with the panel's voltage regulator and trigger all kinds of weird stuff. now i always bring a multimeter to any intermittent trouble call.

drew_patel5720d ago

My multimeter gets more action than my social life at this point. Dead batteries are the gremlins of the security world.