Dakota Alert BBT-2500 Wireless Infrared Beam Transmitter-Receiver Pair - Solar Powered Alarm System, Detects Up To 300-FT

Bought these as a replacement for my old alarm that was starting to give false alarms due to failing batteries (I guess).any way this is a good product,my old sensors were 20 plus years old and worked very well.

I have had the BBT-2500 sensors for a year now and this is what I have experienced: first, they are hard to "pair" until you realize that just because the power buttons light-up that doesn't mean the devices are turned on. You have to press the power buttons a bit harder until they light and stay lit. Not too hard, of course, but I had been pressing just far enough until they lit-up. I had spent several hours inventing new curse words until I realized my mistake, and I think the instructions are not too clear on how the power buttons respond. Second, at high latitudes these do need direct sun in the winter time yet can be in relative shade in the brighter summer months. I have them in a shady driveway in north Idaho and the winters get too dark for the solar panels to keep up. I have found a workaround by putting 12 volt power directly to them. On mine, both the transmitter and receiver have little red plugs on the backside that when removed reveal a standard 12 volt female jack. (I'm not sure all BBTs come with these, based on other customer reviews, but mine have them). I have an automatic gate nearby that has 12 volt power so I just ran wires to the transmitter and receiver to keep them charged through the dark winter months. So other than a few frustrations, the BBT-2500 works well with few false alarms. I only have them shooting across a 25 foot driveway, so I have no experience using these for longer distances.

Installed across our driveway and spaced about 40ft apart, and at a distance of about 100 yd to the receiver located just inside a window at the front of our house. So far, no false alarms but I have been able to quickly walk through the beams faster than the specified minimum break time (100ms I believe) so as not to trip an alarm. Not too concerned as we have other sensors (PIR)for redundancy. I am a little concerned about the product's ability to withstand the weather, as well as the battery life.

Bought this in Jan. and it seemed to work at first then started going off for no reason all hours of the day and night. Sometimes it goes off for nothing sometimes it won't go off when it should. We tried several things to get it to work but nothing helped. Called customer support they said send it back we did. Now it does not work at all. Even had an IT TECH guy look at it and no one can get it to work. Out of a LOT of time and money and company won't make it right :( Do NOT waste your money on this

Easy to install and set up. I have these installed across my driveway covering about 25 feet of frontage and along side a fairly busy road, maybe 4 feet off the shoulder. I am reliably receiving motion detection warnings on my driveway without any false alarms from passing traffic. I'm using the Dakota portable receiver which is usually about 60 feet from the detector transmitter and it, too, is working reliably. I'm very pleased with this purchase.

our Dakota does not allways alert when someone on a bike passes through. Even when they ride verry slow......

I wanted to try this because with PIR sensors, I have never been able to find one that always works right, they tend to either not trigger when they should, or give a lot of false triggers. I figured since this is a "broken beam" type of sensor, surely it would be about 100% reliable. Well, even though it is way more reliable than any of the PIR sensors I've tried, there are still a few times when it doesn't trip. That's even with a car driving through it. I have no idea why it does that occasionally. I have it about 300 ft away from the receiver, and most of the time it trips reliably with just a person walking through the beam... but every now and then, I could walk past it several times and it just doesn't alert.... then for no rhyme or reason it will start working again. Makes no sense to me, you'd think with a broken beam kind of system, it would reliably trip every time a human sized thing walks past it, and it really blows my mind that at times it decides to not trip when a big ole car drives past it?I'd say it works reliably probably about 97% to 98% of the time, and the good thing about this, over the PIR sensors I've tried is it NEVER gives false alarms, so it is a great improvement over any PIR sensors I've tried... but I'm rating it only 3 stars because I'd expect this to work better since it's a broken beam system... I see no reason for this thing deciding not to trip the alarm at times, even when I completely block the beam, it must be some kind of glitch, but it shouldn't be difficult hardware wise for a system to detect a lose of the beam when it's clearly being blocked. I mean if a car is blocking the beam, you know there is zero laser getting to the sensor, so why at times it won't trip the alarm when this happens is beyond me.

I love the BBT-2500 alarms. I have been using them for 10 years and now have 3 sets on my property. They never have false alarms, they transmit very far (I have one receiver 500 feet away from the transmitter) and I have never had a failure.