Screw up of the day...

[Seeker]

... lifting carpets to reveal many phone wires. The original owner liked to put in phone extensions...


<interlude> this is where thinking ahead would have helped.


... I don't need the phone extensions, I'll cut them out and... what's that noise? Yep, I cleverly cut through my burglar alarm feeds to the PIR sensors breaking the anti-tamper loop and triggering the alarm. The internal alarm could be cancelled but the outside alarm ran for 20 mins (legal limit).


I've resoldered the wires but now have supply/day/fault lights lit which means a blown fuse (according to the manual). Problem is that the panel has another anti-tamper alarm and the engineering code to bypass it appears to have been changed. This self inflicted hassle would be bad enough if I ever used the alarm but I've never set it.

[shiftin_gear98]

Burger.

[Seeker]

Postscript (a logical conundrum). I cut two cables - on checking the sensors I discover that the hall and dining room sensors no longer work so they must be the cables I cut, right?

Apparently not - when I reconnected the wires it blew a fuse (marked as aux) but the dining room sensor started working.

I use an electrician who seems to know everything (and used to install Paragon alarms). After poking around a bit, he looks baffled and then says: "Any chance you swapped the cables?" I admitted there was every chance. It seems that, despite the logical evidence, one of the cables was for the outside siren, why 2 PIR sensors stopped by cutting 1 PIR cable and the siren cable remains a mystery (to me).

I/we also discovered that my ant-tamper alarms for the alarm case and the siren case don't function and that someone had reset the engineering code allowing you to bypass the tamper alarms anyway.

[shiftin_gear98]

Just cut all the wires and bin it.

[Seeker]

Just cut all the wires and bin it.


nah... £48 later (and I had to hold the ladder steady) it's working fine.

[SV650rules]

Just cut all the wires and bin it.

+1

Every time there is the slightest disruption in power supply ( and for many other reasons it seems ) all the house alarms go off around us - and you know what, nobody takes a blind bit of notice - alarms are only any good if you are actually at home and it is your alarm, there are so many false alarms they are nothing but a nuisance these days - and any burglar worth their salt would just carry on as normal safe in the knowledge no neighbours will investigate the alarm going off for the nth time that month...