Jane opens my door at 4:30 am to tell me the garage doorbell has gone off—a detached garage on the other side of the garden, its big door on the other side of the fence. This is a remote doorbell we have in the garage to signal one of us needs help. It had waked her up, so she hurried to see if I was in bed and not out in the garage locked out of the house at 4 am in the dark and freezing cold.
So we wonder if we have a burglar who’s hit the wrong button to open the door.
Or a stray cat with thumbs.
We consider calling the police, just to check it out. But Jane thinks it’s a malfunction. She says the front well misbehaved a few days ago and rang several times for one push.
We get the garage door opener, and open the door to see if anybody runs out. Twice. Nada.
It goes off again. It’s a cold morning, a little rime of ice. Maybe moisture’s gotten in it.
Maybe, though this doorbell unit is only a year old, we have a problem.
Maybe it needs a new battery. It is a wireless remote.
The darned thing is continuing to go off periodically. Definitely not a burglar. I think we may try a battery change.
Be persistent asking the nearby neighbors if they’ve installed anything recently that’s also wireless. They might not recognize how something new they’ve got might be wireless. Sounds like frequency collision. Got a DIP switch on your thingy that will allow you to change frequency?
Possibility, but who is operating a wireless device at 4am? My ex used to set off the neighbor’s garage opener with his radio unit in a service truck. Maybe someone is driving through the neighborhood with something like that. Or maybe it is a ghost. On the other hand, you could be right about frost causing a short.
It’s hard to predict what might be “going off” at 4AM. The technology is being used for all sorts of things; things their users might not be aware of. I’m reminded of the famous afternoon lecture Michael Faraday gave to the children of Paris about the burning of a candle. People will use things they don’t try to understand.
If you change the battery, you might be able to change the DIP switches, as Paul said.
We used to be able to set off car alarms with our ham radios in San Diego. Fords were notorious for having their frequencies either close to the 220MHz band, or a first or second harmonic of that band. My friend used to get a kick watching all the salesmen come running to reset the alarms.
I’m guessing it’s probably the battery, though.
I heard stories many years ago about when Air Force One flew the President into March Air Force Base in Riverside County, CA, and all the local citizens’ automatic garage doors opened and closed erratically.
If it’s not the wireless frequency, might it be something like this? My battery-powered fire-alarms start beeping at increasingly short intervals when the battery power gets low, as a warning to change the battery: at first it’s one beep in 6 hours or so, then the beeps get closer together until once when I came home after a weekend it was going off twice in one hour. Maybe your battery-powered doorbell has a similar inbuilt warning?
On the other hand, snow and ice can get into doorbell-pushbuttons and cause a short, where rain would never get in – I had that happen last winter and just changed the pushbutton to a better-closed one.
Or the spring is worn, and weather is hitting it and setting it off. As I have mentioned before, I am a high static electricity person. I have found that watches with stainless steel cases will keep running when I wear those, as will mechanicals. If it turns out to be wet inside, you might try a squishy button cover over it. Perhaps covering the entire installation with squishy rubber?
Repeat heads up:
http://www.tor.com/stories/2013/03/protector-excerpt?utm_source=Feedburner%3A+Frontpage+Partial+RSS+Feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Torcom%2FFrontpage_Partial+%28Tor.com+Frontpage+Partial+-+Blog+and+Stories%29
Just a little taste of things to come. . .!!!
Wonderful! a good long taste
Ah, faulty electrical / digital gizmos. Such fun. (Not.) — The battery’s a likely culprit, though other suggestions are good.
Cats with thumbs? Now there’s an idea! — My two would be into the cat food and in and out the door at will, for sure. — Cats with thumbs on starships…I seem to recall a very nice saga of five books that could use another few books…. 😉
(Wow, I haven’t read Andre Norton’s Zero Stone or its companion volume in ages. Eet, a telepathic cat with, if I remember right, another extra or two. Thumbs, maybe.)
Also of note: About 11 days and counting until Protector. One is still in Inheritor, delayed by real life busy-ness, but one may decide to break with tradition, skip ahead, then return to Inheritor.
I knew people who were very glad their front door didn’t have a lever handle. One of their cats was quite aware of how to open the door – he just couldn’t get a good enough grip on the knob to get it to open, and not for want of trying. (I saw the same cat go up a concrete wall – stucco-covered blocks – in two leaps. Vertically.)
My owner, O Tetsu Neko, has opposable claws. She can touch the tips of her extended end claws together. My spousal unit’s owner, Huntress Dawn, has two perfectly usable thumbs. Fortunately, riding herd on one human seems to be all they care to do.
Cats are no fools. If they had opposable thumbs, we’d rule the world for them.
Mmmmm… uhhhmmm… ahhh… They need opposable thumbs for that?