Spent 6 hours troubleshooting a Vista 21ip panel for a dead horn that wasn't even wired right

Went to this house in Arlington last Tuesday for a service call on a system that had been installed 2 years ago. Customer said the alarm horn stopped working out of nowhere. I checked the panel voltage, tested the horn, swapped zones, even reprogrammed the output. Took me 6 freaking hours before I noticed the installer had run the horn wires through a different partition. So when the alarm tripped, the horn driver was getting triggered, but the actual bell output was assigned to a partition that was set to "unused" in programming lol. Has anyone else burned half a day on something that dumb?

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barbara_moore739d ago

You know, I used to roll my eyes at the younger guys who would say "check the basics first" and think they were just wasting time. But I had a similar one last spring on a DSC PowerSeries. Spent almost four hours swapping out a keypad because it wouldn't light up, only to find the previous guy had the red wire on the black terminal. Felt like a fool. So now I always start by checking the wiring against the diagram, even if it looks right at first glance. It's just too easy to overlook something simple when you assume the install was done correctly.