Hope everyone is having a good day! I have a client that has a 6'x6'x3' powder coated steel "jail cell" that he uses as a display case. You can fit an arm between the bars and potentially grab something inside of it, but in so doing you will almost definitely touch one of the bars. I figure I should be able to run some kind of capacitance switch to trigger the panel, but thought I would see if anybody here has tried something similar first. My fallback is to use an access control style motion REX to create a "wall" right in front of the cage. Any ideas? Thanks in advance for the help!
Subscriber Discussion
I Need A Steel Cage To Alarm On Touch. Any Capacitive Switch Alarm Experience?
Michael Silva
Feb 08, 2017There used to be commercially available capacitance alarms that were commonly used to protect safes. You needed to isolate the safe from the ground using insulators that looked like hockey pucks. You connected one wire to the safe and another to earth ground. You then tuned the capacitance alarm to establish a normal condition based on the capacitance between the ground and the safe. Once this condition was established, anyone touching the safe would change the capacitance and activate the alarm.
I installed many of these back in the day and they were very reliable. Lifting the safe to place the pucks and drilling the safe to fasten the wire were sometimes a challenge.
It sounds like this type of system would work well in your application if you were somehow able to insulate the cage from the ground. Unfortunately, I did a quick search and don't see this type of product being offered for sale anymore. Probably no longer much demand.
UI
Undisclosed Integrator #1
Feb 08, 2017That was exactly what I was looking for. The cage actually sits on a large rubber mat on top of tile so it's already isolated, so I figured it would be smooth sailing. I know I can rig something, but I'd really rather not spend 8 hours of trial and error to get there.
Michael Silva
Feb 08, 2017One of the very popular models of this type of alarm was the Ademco #1401. It's a long shot, but you might be able to find a used one on Ebay or other auction site.
DD
Dan Droker
Feb 09, 2017You might be able to use the guts from a touch sense exit device and connect it to the cage instead of the exit bar.
MC
Marty Calhoun
Feb 09, 2017Back in the day, and believe me it was a few years back we used to wire many Safes with devices that would detect the negativity of the Human Body and cause an alarm. The previous report is correct it was the Ademco # 1401. Only problem was back in the day. alarm panels typically had ONE zone, maybe TWO if you were working with some version of 'Exit/Entry modules". We used the FBI (Fire- Burglary -Instruments) 850 for commercial applications.
Technicians now have no idea what it is like to actually, really troubleshoot and alarm system.
Brian Karas
Feb 09, 2017"we used to wire many Safes with devices that would detect the negativity of the Human Body and cause an alarm"
What happened if you were robbed by an optimistic thief? :)
MC
Marty Calhoun
Feb 09, 2017LOL, hey Brian back in that day alarms had dry cell batteries and if (thats a big if) it was a fancy one you might have a endless loop Tape Dialer that send a guaranteed to be garbled message to the local aggravated Police dispatchers.
People were not as inventive back then as they seem to be now, I suppose?
David Johnson
Feb 09, 2017FBI panel - brings back some memories Marty! Before that we used to build our own 'keyswitch' activated panels.
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