How to Repair a Motion Detector Light How to Repair a Motion Detector Light A motion detector light is a security feature which can be installed outside any home. The sensor works by detecting motion in its field of vision, which will cause the light to turn on. This can be a problem if the light is over-sensitive and is triggered by cats, small insects, or even by stray dust moving in a certain manner. This problem can be overcome, but there are a number of other faults which the motion detector light can suffer. Rather than taking it back to the shop, or even replacing it with a new one, you can try a few troubleshooting tips and see if you can repair your troublesome light. Step 1 - Fix a Light That Won't Turn Off This is a more common problem than you might expect, particularly after lights have been damaged in some way—for example, by an electricity surge. If you find that after resetting all the other electrical items in your home, your motion detector light is still shining (and there hasn't been any motion), then you can conclude that it too has been affected by the surge and needs to be reset.

Remove the light from the wall, and take out your instruction manual. This should have a list of all the buttons featured on the light, including the reset button. This will usually be red (and might even be marked "reset"). Press this until the light turns itself off. If clicking the reset button doesn't help, then you may find that running a cleaning brush over the surface, or even pushing a piece of paper down the side does the trick. Step 2 - Fix a Light That Still Won't Turn Off Another reason for the motion detector light not turning off is cold weather. As with everything to do with the cold, motion detector lights can be seriously damaged by frost or ice. When frost lands on the contacts, this can make the light freeze so that it can be stuck on the ‘on’ position. Remove your light from the wall, and leave in a warm garage, or even by a radiator, until it goes off. Step 3 – Fix a Light That Won't Go On The opposite problem can actually be caused by the same reasons.

However, if you have tried the above methods for getting your light to turn off and haven’t succeeded, then you should consider whether the light contains a damaged photocell. This part will either need a replacement or it could simply be dirty. Replacing Headlight Bulb 2012 Dodge ChargerThe motion sensor, which triggers the light, should be cleaned regularly to avoid it becoming clogged. Poodle Puppies For Sale WashingtonYou can also simply increase the sensitivity on the sensor, as this will solve the basic problem.Indoor Light Timer Target Step 4 – Try Other Simple Repairs Sometimes, the easiest repairs can solve major problems. If it seems like the motion sensor light has given up the ghost, then you should try cleaning the sensor first, and then remove the old bulb from the light and insert a new one.

It is surprising how many times changing the bulb fixes a troublesome motion detector light. Solar Lights can Add Easy Functionality to your Yard I have had 2 outdoor motion detectors on each side of the front door for approximately 5 years. Suddenly one of them refuses to go off. The other one continues to work fine. I tried a different bulb, and turning it off and then on again, but it hasn't helped. Since it worked before, and the other one is still working, I am thinking it's not the wiring. Do sensors go bad? If you have had any lightning in the area it can leave the sensor in the always on mode. Some sensors I have used require a 5 minute powered off cycle to reset them. A power surge,spike or blip can also fry the electronics. I also had a unit that came on even in the day light. It turned out to be a mudwasp nest covering the photosensor.Browse other questions tagged lighting outdoor or ask your own question. Designing a motion sensor for an outdoor-intended illumination system is a fairly challenging endeavor, if you think about it.

You want it to respond to your movement or (heaven forbid) that of an unwanted intruder, and over an adequate distance and coverage footprint, but not react to leaves blowing in the wind, rain or snow falling from the sky, or critters scurrying along the ground. And you only want the lights to turn on after dark, not during the day…which means that you need to augment the motion sensor with a light sensor, but one that isn’t fooled by the lights you’re trying to control, or by reflections created by (for example) a rain puddle illuminated by some other light source. Three-plus months ago, I mentioned that I’d recently wrapped up the construction of a two-car garage with studio space above it, located next door to my residence. I’ve got two Heath/Zenith (HeathCo) SL-5718 two-light clusters with integrated motion sensors (which, strangely, are labeled as SL-5318 units, although they include the normal/soft/flash lamp mode switch which is included with the SL-5718 but absent from the SL-5318):

mounted to the structure, one on the front, directly above the garage door: and the other on the side, at the end of the deck and at the top of two flights of stairs (one headed to the front corner of the structure, the other to the back): Mine are the ‘RS’ rust-colored version; they also come in black (’BK’) and white (’WH’) variants, along with cryptic sub-variants encompassing what I assume are version letters (’A', ‘B’, and ‘C’). They’re pretty slick, feature-wise (PDF), at least in concept; along with the aforementioned lamp mode, you can set the ‘on’ time for 1, 5, or 20 minutes (along with a day-or-night 5-second test mode), they include a manual always-on override, and the optional DualBrite setting keeps them on at half-bright illumination for 3 hours, 6 hours, or dusk-to-dawn, with full-bright illumination (again, for 1, 5 or 20 minutes) upon motion detection. I say ‘in concept’ because although they worked great through the summer, over the past few months they’ve driven me absolutely batty.

In my particular case, the lights refuse to turn off once they first go on at night, or they turn off for a few seconds and then abruptly turn on again even in the absence of any in-motion objects, both cases suggestive to me of an over-enthusiastic motion sensor. However, if you peruse the comments forums for both the SL-5718 and related SL-5318 on Amazon, Home Depot, Smarthome, and other retailer websites, you’ll also find lots of other complaints; that they won’t go on at all (suggestive of motion sensor failure), that they rapidly strobe on-and-off even when the ‘flash’ lamp mode isn’t enabled (suggestive of an over-enthusiastic light sensor), that they continue to periodically-to-perpetually go on even during daylight hours (suggestive of light sensor failure), etc. I should probably qualify the preceding paragraph by telling you that I am able to get them to work as designed, although the workaround is undesirable in other ways. If I crank the range sensitivity all the way to the ‘minimum’ end of the scale, and if I set the lamps to only go on for 1 minute, I encounter no spurious light turn-ons.

However, in this case motion is only detected when I’m a few feet away from the sensor; two-thirds of the way up the stairs, for example. If I re-calibrate the range sensitivity to a more functional setting (which, it’s important to note, worked fine just a few months back), or if I set the lights to remain on for five minutes, the undesirable mis-behavior reliably resurfaces; both units exhibit the exact same shortcomings. After doing lots of research both of Heath/Zenith’s documentation and of others’ experiences, I’ve brainstormed several different possible reasons for the problems I’m encountering: Before continuing, here’s another crucial piece of the debugging puzzle, the SL-5316 standalone sensor: mounted to one side of the front of the structure, and controlling lights that frame either side of the garage door: It’s identical to the motion sensors integrated within the SL-5318 and SL-5718 lamp clusters, and has worked flawlessly since the day it was installed in spite of a distance sensitivity setting near the maximum end of the range.

It’s exposed to the same atmospheric and power grid conditions as its SL-5718 brethren. But have you figured out the key difference? Instead of being a few inches away from its mated lights, it’s a foot-plus below them, and the bulbs are also of lower intensity than those in the SL-5718. It’s time for another quote from the FAQ page: HEAT: Halogen bulbs produce a great deal of heat. Since the sensor works by detecting the movement of heat across the front of the sensor, sometimes the heat from halogen bulbs is enough to trigger the sensor to turn on. At first glance, this possible explanation didn’t make sense to me. Wouldn’t the problem be worse in the summer, when high ambient temperatures magnified the heat coming off the bulbs, versus in the winter, when cold air counteracted the bulbs’ warmth? But the FAQ’s subsequent sentence encouraged me to keep pondering (bolded emphasis is mine): Note: Different seasons of the year (very cold or very hot) will increase the possibility of self-triggering.

And a tidbit from the user manual (PDF) caused the light bulb to go on in my head: Avoid aiming the control at objects that change temperature rapidly, such as heating vents and air conditioners. These heat sources could cause false triggering. It’s not the absolute sensed temperature that causes the problem, I eventually ascertained, it’s the rate of temperature change over time that’s the crux of the issue. When it’s colder outside, the ambient temperature (negative) change detected by the motion sensor is more rapid once the lights turn off, especially when the lights have previously been on longer (5 or 20 minutes, versus 1 minute). This combination of factors exactly describes my issue; the lights initially turn on at night in response to sensed motion, they turn off after the configured amount of time, but then they turn back on again (and off…and on…all night long) because the lamps’ cool-off temperature profile is incorrectly sensed as object motion.

The saddest bit of this scenario is Heath/Zenith’s proposed debug-and-fix, once again from the FAQ: Translation: Heath/Zenith is expecting its customers to do exactly the workaround that I hit-and-miss stumbled across; compensate for its inherently poor thermal-resistance engineered design by excessively dialing down the range sensitivity, at least during cold times of year. Heath/Zenith’s engineers, you’ve gotta be kidding me; Readers, I realize that designing products for tech-clueless and -adverse consumers isn’t easy. They expect that the widgets they buy will ‘just work’ out-of-box, and to be so intuitive in configuration and operation that cracking open the owner’s manual isn’t ever necessary. Don’t bother trying to label these demands ‘unrealistic’; they represent the bar that you’re expected to repeatedly clear, and if you don’t like it, you might as well get out of this particular business. The appropriate response, instead, is something that a company like Apple obviously ‘gets’;