Hello all:
My WYZE Motion Sensor seems to be stuck on. The sensor is in my basement watching the stairs. It stays on for hours at a time.
Then I was reading how the sensor uses passive infrared. So I’m wondering if my furnace puts out passive infrared. It is right next to the stairs coming down. Obviously the furnace doesn’t move, but maybe it is affecting it?
Comments welcome,
PS: what is passive infrared vs. active infrared?
PPS: ok, ok, I’ll just google it. 
Hi, @mattjohnson2005. Try removing the battery from the motion sensor and reset it. I know this has worked for others so hopefully this is the case with yours too.
Also, out-of-range is the biggest reason for this. The sensor has to be able to change the status on the servers, or it will stay on the old status. Any transmission can upright the issue, like removing/reinstalling the battery or just walking in front of the sensor. But you must be in range. I had this issue once on a battery that wasn’t fully seated. It kept losing contact with the bridge. I had to open it up and correct that to fix it.
Passive Infrared Sensors (PIR) detect the presence or absence of an infrared emitting source usually above a given threshold. They are most commonly used to trigger lighting or security alarms. They do not receive or pass on information about what the source is or if it’s even moving or not.
An Active Infrared Sensor adds movement and directionality to the information and can even be tuned to determine what its “seeing” to a degree, a person, or a large or small animal or a car etc. They are often used in security applications that need positive indication of movement and direction.
Very good, thanks for the easy explanation. It sounds like active sensors will output a matrix of changing values showing moving pixels while passive only will output a range, like 1 to 255.
OK, I will try that. I forgot the first rule of troubleshooting, ‘turn it off and turn it on again.’ I suppose with battery powered devices this is ‘pull the battery and put it in again.’
Thanks, Matt
That’s actually pretty close! There are some excellent resources that go into great detail if you are interested. I find a combination of an active and passive sensor suits my needs. Very little gets by both. At least little of anything I care about. Both sensors missed a dead tree falling. No IR source I imagine.