This has been a good and timely discussion as I have an independent low fuel warning system from Aircraft Extras in my RV8 that sometimes is very distracting. When I installed it I calibrated it with IFR operations in mind to alert at approximately 30 minutes fuel remaining in each tank (~4 gallons). However, I have found that due to fuel sloshing uncovering the optical sensor during turbulence or any maneuvering, the alarm will alert with as much as 8-10 gallons remaining in either tank. Trying to continually acknowledge and silence the alarm particularly during formation flying is a real pain and potentially dangerous since the acknowledge/reset button is panel mounted. What is most distracting isn't the alert lights but rather the audio alarm. I like Keith's solution (post #3) and intend to utilize an unused switch on my Infinity stick to silence all aural alarms.

I too have Garmin's G3x system in my plane and while its alert settings and sensitivity can be adjusted, having to go into a menu, find what you want and then only able to either leave the system enabled or completely inhibited while flying in my opinion is not the best solution. What's needed is a simple one touch method for simply acknowledging and silencing the alert without completely turning off the system. Voice activation would be even better.

J. Baker

I fly a G3x with that same low fuel +Alert and indeed it is very distracting. I need to change that planes config to remove the Alert part.

In my Long EZ, I had an alarm which triggered when nose gear was not down and locked and the throttle was near idle (this is per the plans). A lot of people added a aural defeat to the system so they got the alarm and then turned it off. Some of them went on to do gear up landings. When I wired the alarm, I put in a solid state time delay in series before alarm (in this case it would be right before it went into the GEA24).

I had a button on the stick which sent power to the time delay, closing which removed the power from the alarm pin and clearing the alarm. After the time expired, if the condition hadn't cleared, then the alarm came back on.

These time delays come in both hard coded and variable time setting. So for a fuel low announcement, maybe a time delay of 10 minutes or something. This would be a good feature to add to the G3X alarm system.

MTCW,

Good call. A little latching relay would do the trick also.
Once it gets the first trigger it would stay on.

+1 for just an aural inhibit

Steve,

the idea is to deactivate the nuisance terrain warnings with one touch of a button contrary to pressing buttons and selecting an option in the menu in a high workload environment when maneuvering close to obstacles or when in the approach/landing phase..

Reactivating the warnings would have the same simplicity -just push 1 button again..

Thanks,