Just realized I was wiring motion sensors in series all wrong

For 5 years I had been daisy-chaining motion sensors on my commercial installs in downtown Portland, and they were always tripping false alarms. Last week a building manager showed me his old system using parallel wiring with a common resistor, and the false alarms stopped completely. Any other installers run into this issue with their motion setups?

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1 Comment

davis.keith2d ago

Gotta say, I see this a little different. Series wiring can work fine if you match the resistors right and check your voltage drop. Parallel setups like that building manager had are more forgiving, sure, but they're not always the answer for every install. False alarms usually come from bad ground loops or interference on the line, not the wiring style itself. Might be worth double checking the sensor specs before blaming the daisy chain.