A customer's dog taught me more about PIR sensors than the manual ever did

Last month I was doing a routine install in a house outside Austin and the homeowner had this big fluffy husky that kept wandering into the living room where I was mounting the motion detector. I kept getting false triggers during the test mode, and I was about to blame the unit until I watched the dog walk right under the sensor and noticed the pattern on his white fur was reflecting the sunlight from a south window. Turns out the sensor was picking up the light off the dog's coat, not body heat, and once I repositioned the lens angle 15 degrees down and shaded the window, it worked perfect. I looked it up later on a manufacturer forum and found out that reflective surfaces, even light-colored pets, can cause false alarms in direct sun, which is something I never saw in any training video. I've been in this trade for 8 years and never once thought about animal fur as a mirror, but now I check for that before I even drill the first hole. Has anyone else dealt with a weird false alarm cause that took you forever to figure out?

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