The title kinda says it all: my 15-lb feline friend constantly triggers my motion sensors with his comings and goings around the house. Right now, I just have a couple of Iris motion sensors (v2 or v3... Not exactly sure which), and I've just received some Sylvania Lightify motion and temperature sensor, but I haven't set those up yet.
Any tips on reducing the sensitivity of my current devices? Suggestions on new ones? My Z-Wave mesh seems reasonably strong, so I'm open to Z-Wave sensors if there are any that folks recommend. I just went with Zigbee based on some posts where people seemed to prefer their response times.
I too, have fought the battle with a cat- and with the same sensors you’ve listed. For me, it came down to a lot of trial and error as I will not give up the responsiveness I get with these sensors. In most areas, I was able to mount them upside down, which changes the angle enough that they only catch the taller members of the family. In other places, I put a short length of plastic tubing over the lens, limiting the field of view.
Another option is to find custom ball joint mounts on sites like Etsy that allow for adjustability.
Good call on the adjustments... I'll have to try the plastic tubing, too. I'm especially intrigued by the ball joint mount idea. I remember seeing a post along those lines that had a nice-looking design, so I'll check into that.
You can narrow the sensitivity angle (significantly) by making small paper tubes to put around the translucent part that protrudes from the front ala @mike.maxwell
There is a built in app called Zone Motion Controllers which is supposed to allow you to setup a False Motion Reduction virtual device to use as your trigger so you can define how many devices have to be triggered in a set time frame, however in my testing I had it setup with a minimum Active Threshold of 2 and an Activation Window of 5 seconds and the virtual device still changed to active with just one of the motion detectors activating. Not sure what I had wrong in that.
I'd have half the motion sensors I currently do without cats. A lot of my motion lighting rules use two sensors - one which is out of the view of typical cat traffic, but captures human room entry and the 2nd sensor covers a wider area and serves to keep the light on, but not turn it on. Lots of trail and error
