When there is a power outage and the neighborhood loses electricity, I noticed a lot of car alarms go off. Why does that happen?
In: Engineering
It’s probably burglar alarms in houses, not cars. They have a battery to ring out if the power is cut, because otherwise burglars would just cut the power to a building to disable the alarms.
Are you SURE it’s car alarms and not house alarms that default to making noise when the power is cut?
I’ve never heard of car alarms going off when the power goes out.
They’re not connected, there’s no sensor in the car to detect nearby electricity. Power going out nearby isn’t going to trigger a car alarm.
What I *have* seen happen is lightning strikes, which blows a transformer or something that causes an outage. Then, the thunder from the lightning resonates at a frequency that triggers car alarms.
Was there a thunderstorm when you saw this happen?
Could be that a blown transformer caused the power outage and the explosion caused car alarms to go off. Wouldn’t always be the cause and case, but could be some of the time.
Probably a transformer going pop. Transformer faults are often the cause of outages (or can be caused by a larger outage) and can make a pretty impressive kaboom. The shock is likely to set off nearby car alarms.
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