ZoneMinder Forums

HI!

After half a year of ZM usage, I noticed > 85% of events are actually weather triggered: sudden change in light, shadows appear/disappear, street colour change caused by rain etc.
I set up fast and small preclusive zones to cover spots with light change caused by weather, but looks like active zones prevail.
The only successful is preventing of alarm in case of light turn on (IR sensor). This do not trigger events.

I would be very happy, to get some advice about zones setup.
The size of active and preclusive zones, which presets for each and which alarm check method (pixels / blobs) and fine tune of zone settings.

I have the same problem, but haven't yet taken the time to look for a solution.

My plan was to make videos of existing events, both bogus (weather, shadows, etc) and real. Then I could set up a monitor using those videos and try out different parameters to the Modect rules. (See Modect - use existing events to test new zone rules? thread for how to do that.)

In the meantime, here's to hoping someone out there maybe has some "rules of thumb" for helping to ignore weather-related events but still capture truly interesting events.

(Though I have to say, my night time videos where I've captured lightning in the rain are pretty cool!)

I found that setting the Buffers / Alarm Frame Count to 2 or 3 greatly reduced the number of wind related events I was getting. I have settled on 2, as 3 caused the occasional missed event.

Most of the areas I monitor are heavily wooded. On a windy sunny day, moving shadows of leafy branches caused numerous false events. That has largely stopped. It's not perfect, but I can live with it. Patchy clouds caused similar problems. A preclusion zone over an unshaded portion of the nearby road has helped somewhat in that situation. I am still experimenting with placement and size.

Hope this helps.