TIL some motion detectors hate LED bulbs - found out the hard way

I read a forum post last night where a guy in Phoenix said his new Bosch motion detectors were triggering false alarms every night around 8 PM. Turns out his customer's LED bulbs in the living room were pumping out infrared interference (who knew?). I swapped a test unit at my own house from a hallway with incandescent bulbs to one with LEDs and got the same issue - 3 false alarms in 2 hours. Has anyone else run into this with specific brands like Honeywell or DSC?

3 comments

3 Comments

tarar271mo ago

LEDs are fine, your install's just trash.

james_kim1mo ago

Your install's just trash." Man, that's a hot take. I swapped one bulb from incandescent to LED in my own damn living room and got false alarms within minutes. So unless my wiring is secretly cursed, it's the bulb not my install. That Phoenix guy's story about the 8 PM thing lines up perfectly with people turning on lights when they get home. Honeywell sensors seem extra picky about it too. People swear LEDs are perfect but they pump out way more infrared noise than anything else. It's not always the install being sloppy, sometimes it's just a bad match between the bulb and the sensor.

the_charlie16d ago

Hold up, "LEDs are fine" isn't totally accurate across the board. A lot of cheaper LED bulbs use noisy switching power supplies that dump infrared interference right in the 700-900nm range that PIR sensors look for. I had a customer with a Honeywell DT series that kept tripping and swapping out his Feit LEDs for name brand Philips bulbs fixed it completely. So it's not that LEDs are bad, it's that certain cheap ones mess with sensors that were designed before LEDs were common.