Now when we moved into this house back in 2001, we took the option to have a security system wired into the house whilst it was being built. Amongst other things it has a number of movement sensors throughout the house. Although we were fairly certain that Sophie was small enough when wandering around the house not to trip the sensors, we did have a reduced activation set-up that enabled us to, having shut various doors in the house, arm the alarm in those areas, but not in those that Sophie spent her time. So we’ve been carefully ensuring that we use the reduced set when she is in the house.

Anyway, when Beth got home, she got to the front door, put the key in the lock, was about to open the door and the alarm went off. She came in and checked the house, but all the doors that were supposed to be closed were closed, and nothing seemed amiss. When I got home a little while later, I dug out the manual, and following the instructions tracked back through the log to see what caused the activation. Thankfully it was only activated when Beth got home – so the alarm hadn’t been going off all day, but what was surprising was that the activation was from one of the sensors that was supposed to be disabled. Checking on through the settings, it turns out that the reduced activation set-up that we thought we had, wasn’t set, instead it has been fully arming the whole system all the time.

Now what is quite amazing is that she hasn’t set it off up to now, so it does seem to confirm what we thought, that the sensors don’t pick her up. Having said that, we don’t quite know what she did to set it off today. She does tend to get up and come downstairs when she hears someone pull in to the drive – maybe she’s put on more weight, as she certainly is bigger since her treatment settled down her hyperthyroid. Having said that, having tried a bit of experimentation, and watching the sensors as she moves around, she doesn’t seem to be activating anything.

Of course, needless to say she’s being totally uncooperative about helping experiment with what sets off the sensors, suddenly all the places we usually have problems with her jumping on to, she won’t jump to… Typical.