Found a weird battery drain issue in an old motion sensor last week
I was doing a routine system check at a client's house, one of those older residential setups. The central panel was showing a low battery alert for a single hallway motion sensor. I pulled the unit down, and the new battery I put in just six months ago was already dead. That made no sense. I started checking the wiring in the ceiling box, nothing looked frayed or loose. On a hunch, I got out my meter and found a tiny, constant draw even when the sensor was supposedly in sleep mode. The client said they never had this problem until recently. I'm thinking the sensor's internal board might be failing and pulling power when it shouldn't. Has anyone else run into a gremlin like this with older gear? I swapped the unit out to be safe, but I'm curious what actually causes it.