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How do motion sensing lights and burglar alarms work?

        Home & Garden | Home Security

Motion sensor lights, like the lights on this building, detect infrared energy.
Michael Ledray/

­T­here are many different ways to create a motion sensor. For example:

  • It is common for stores to have a beam of light crossing the room near the door, and a photosensor on the other side of the ­room. When a customer breaks the beam, the photosensor detects the change in the amount of light and rings a bell.
  • Many grocery stores have automatic door openers that use a very simple form of radar to detect when someone passes near the door. The box above the door sends out a burst of microwave radio energy and waits for the reflected energy to bounce back. When a person moves into the field of microwave energy, it changes the amount of reflected energy or the time it takes for the reflection to arrive, and the box opens the door. Since these devices use radar, they often set off radar detectors.
  • The same thing can be done with ultrasonic sound waves, bouncing them off a target and waiting for the echo.

All of these are active sensors. They inject energy (light, microwaves or sound) into the environment in order to detect a change of some sort.


The devices themselves are simple electronic components not unlike a photosensor. The infrared light bumps electrons off a substrate, and these electrons can be detected and amplified into a signal.

You have probably noticed that your light is sensitive to motion, but not to a person who is standing still. That's because the electronics package attached to the sensor is looking for a fairly rapid change in the amount of infrared energy it is seeing. When a person walks by, the amount of infrared energy in the field of view changes rapidly and is easily detected. You do not want the sensor detecting slower changes, like the sidewalk cooling off at night.

Your motion sensing light has a wide field of view because of the lens covering the sensor. Infrared energy is a form of light, so you can focus and bend it with plastic lenses. But it's not like there is a 2-D array of sensors in there. There is a single (or sometimes two) sensors inside looking for changes in infrared energy.

­ If you have a burglar alarm with motion sensors, you may have noticed that the motion sensors cannot "see" you when you are outside looking through a window. That is because glass is not very transparent to infrared energy. This, by the way, is the basis of a greenhouse. Light passes through the glass into the greenhouse and heats things up inside the greenhouse. The glass is then opaque to the infrared energy these heated things are emitting, so the heat is trapped inside the greenhouse. It makes sense that a motion detector sensitive to infrared energy cannot see through glass windows.

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