Bad Alarm Installation Pictures

Hey All,

20 year alarm professional here. I am helping put together a low voltage course at an inner-city trade school that will include security / fire. I'm looking for pictures of bad installations. Nothing private labled, I don't want to harpoon any particular installation company. But we all know that even the best companies can hire bad installers.

Wish I thought of this years ago. The stuff I've seen, and fired techs for.

Looking for things like resistors in the control, improper color codes (wrong wires for pos & neg), non-fire wire for smokes, a rate of rise in the attic, crooked devices, smoke detector in the garage, bad cable runs, staples in the wires, using a T-18 on Coax, firewire running diagonally across the dining room ceiling...

You get the idea. I've seen all of those, and many more.

My fav was a service call because of no monitoring station response from an alarm. The phoneline was wired to the motion sensor. The phoneline never made it to the panel. 4 cond wire ran straight from the phone block to the PIR. Yet the monitoring station had a full set of signals on installation day. The tech (using that word lightly) probably sent the sigs from his house prior to install. I do not wish to speak evil of the dead, but Emergency Networks was the pioneer of "slap 'em in, and run like hell with the signed monitoring contract, and sell it to whoever is paying the most that day". Installers were paid piecework & commission. 4 one man installs in a day were not uncommon.

Emergency Networks was the same company that pretty much bankrupted the Alert Center, with the volume of contracts they sold them, with very high attrition rate. No credit checks back then.

Anyways, if someone could point me in the right direction for some really great pictures of horrible installs, it would be very much appreciated. Does not need to be limited to security, could be cable TV, satellite, anything low voltage.

Thanks for your time, Bill

Reply to
emaillogins
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All the pictures of Robert BAss's jobs/installs are in Connecticut. Maybe some one up there in the Hartford area can take pictures of some of BAss's installs for you. There should be plenty of shots for you to show in your trade school course. Nothing better than having a few "What not to do" pictures as an example.

Norm Mugford

I choose Polesoft Lockspam to fight spam, and you?

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Reply to
Norm Mugford

Here's what I have

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Reply to
alarman

There is nothing automatically wrong about putting a rate of rise head in an attic. What's wrong is using a 136 degree rate of rise head in an attic.

But I look forward to seeing your photo gallery. Put it up on the web someplace.

- badenov

Reply to
Nomen Nescio

I have a ton of pictures bad installs and fires caused by 120 voltage and low voltage defects from various investigations if your intrested.

Reply to
Nick Markowitz

I just happened across one the other day on a monitored fire alarm system. Picture this: a DSC 5010 control board mounted inside a PC-1000 box with double sided tape. The keypad is also located inside the same box (you got it... wedged between the cover and the pc board).

Regards, Frank (No, not that "Frank". The other one.)

Reply to
FIRETEK

Picture this. Cool/cloudy summer summer morning. Clouds break, temp goes up 15-20 outside, attic temp can easily jump up 30-40 degrees in far less time than the threshold of a rate of rise. Don't know where you're at, but in my neck of the woods, a 140 degree attic is not uncommon during July / August on a 95-100 degree sunny day. I can only recall ever having to pull one out because of this.

Reply to
emaillogins

Sorry, haven't been on the "groups" in a few years. This was a reply to question of "why not put a rate of rise in an attic?"

Reply to
emaillogins

I have a ton of pictures bad installs and fires caused by 120 voltage and low voltage defects from various investigations if your intrested.

Yes, very interested! Feel free to forward them to the email address in my user name: snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com They can spam away there. I only use that address to send out Gmail invitations to my students.

Reply to
emaillogins

Another one I wish I had taken pictures of... Was doing a takeover years ago on an install originally put in by a fly by night company called Homestead Security. I think they started in Milwaukee, and branched out into the midwest. A DSC 1550(?) control mounted 6 inches from the front door. Surface mount contact on the front door, keypad on the control panel door, motion mounted 1 foot above the control, siren another foot above that, all wires stapled next to each other like railroad tracks on the wall. Another wire stapled along the baseboards the length of the house for the backdoor. Up and around all the door frames as it went. There was an RJ jack, but he just ran the red & green. No seizure. And no backup battery in the panel. The cust recalled the installer telling her it was normal for the trouble light to be on all the time.

Reply to
emaillogins

Absolutely. That's why you should only use rate of rise heads in attics if they have a temperature rating of 190-200 degrees. If you use 136 degree rate of rise heads, you'll definitely wish you hadn't.

As I recall, the threshhold of a rate of rise detector is 15 degrees F per minute. That is, if the temperature increases at a rate less than that, it doesn't go into alarm. I don't think attic temperatures ever increase that rapidly unless there's a fire, at least I've never seen it. I've put lots of 190 degree rate of rise heads inside attics and even skylights, and they don't go off.

And if your attic is over 190 degrees, you have a definite problem. :-)

Think about the attic problems you've seen, and I'll bet the head was popped, rather than causing an alarm and restore. If so, that's not a problem with the rate of rise portion of the head.

Rate of rise heads cover a much larger area than fixed temperature heads, and they respond much quicker to a fire.

- badenov

Reply to
Nomen Nescio

Reply to
Everywhere Man

I thought his "trademark" was the blank cover plates he left on walls "for future phone services or speaker jacks". :-)

Reply to
Frank Olson

Some common Rate-of-Rise hear detectors require a 15ºF rise per minute before they will respond. I doubt you'll encounter such a rapid rise in a non-fire situation. However, as you correctly mention, summer attic temperatures in excess of 135ºF are common even in the northern parts of the continental US.

Reply to
Robert L Bass

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