DuMP DuMP DuMP .....

If it's a current panel you can donate it to me. Was it one of mine? There aren't too many of us out this way.

Nah. It was another DMP XR panel that locked up. This is the third one. Rather than leave a customer out of service I threw in a brand new Napco Gemini panel.

The old 692 keypads would lock up with heavy voltage spike - like lightning. Easy fix for that. But, I've never seen any of the panel processors lock up though. Did you 86 it?

That hurts Bob. It's like taking a heavily armed, American solder out of the battlefield, and replacing him with Mexican Landscaper carrying a shovel.... you prick! (just kidding)

Tech support had me check bus voltage on each one with keypads connected and without. They said the board was toast each time. Since I have had it happen three times now I suspect some kind of defect or a bad batch of boards or something.

The customer opted to keep it in this last case. In previous ones I saved the keypads for spares and pitched the boards.

What gets me is, "Sorry, Its locked up." When Napco had their bad memory on the P1632 a couple years ago they were sending me repalcement boards and a comp for the time. I only had a couple of those. Same with DSC and some of the early 1555s that died for no apparent reason. Neither just said "Sorry."

You know the boards have a 5 year warranty right?...keypads too.

I've had a few damaged by lightning...the last one I took out a few weeks ago remember that bad storm we had?... It took out an XR-20, two gbs, one smoke, welded 6 window contacts it was two years old sending it back to get rebuilt. The lightning must have been REALLY close because it also took out all the guy's phones, his air handler, all the tvs in the house (this was two days before he was moving out!). It also locked up the keypad at his neighbors house across the street but that system wasn't damaged just the keypad processor locked and I was able to reset it.

Which model? XR10? 20? 200? What?

So far 2 XR-20s and 1 XR-10.

Same symptoms.

man, I've never had a 20 lock up and I must have 400 or so out there. The only 10's Ive had lock up was with the old 692 keypads or lightning damaged.

One thing to note about some of the older 10's...IF the battery is old/bad/low and there's a power outage when power is returned you can have a strange situation - scrambled program (I like to refer to them as inverted data bits), or transformer will fry. In the scramble situation initializing the panel and doing a clean (manually) re-program will fix 99% of panels that suffer from this. And again...these are on old xr-10.

Not sure exactly how old they are. The guy who isntalled them died about three years ago. I think he was in business three or four years. I have all his files so I guess I could check the original installation contracts to see how old they are. Can't be older than six or seven years.

A few hints on the older panels:

Don't let the system batteries go longer than 3 years. In my experience the older panels where/are hard on the batteries...maybe the charging circuit I dunno. But it's like almost to the day...3 years and you'll start getting low batts, no matter what brand you use. Don't ignore low battery sigs fromthese panels - for reasons stated in my last post.

If any of them have 692 keypads - the LED keypads - there was a lockup issue (years ago) that was corrected by the factory adding MOVs on the keypad circuit board. They'd lock up easily with lightning...not the panel locking up the keypad. You could reset them by disconnecting power to the keypad and reconnecting. I still have a few of those out there and I walk the homeowner how to do it over the phone if they don't want to pay for a service call. However, there is/was free replacements available from the factory on those keypads. Call techsupport and see if they are still offering this.

Have you had DMP come out and get your guys trained? They'll do that you know, it might help if you havent.

All the DMP panels I have serviced have LCD Alpha Keypads.

No, I have not. For a whole host of reasons (not the least of which is having something I didn't order charged to my credit card) I don't sell or install new DMP panels. I had a good chuckle when I received my letter this year informing me I was only a servicing dealer due to my low sales volume.

While I have not had training I did have a guy come out and try to hard sell me on going exclusively with DMP controls.

The only problem I have had with DMP panels is this lockup and trashed processor thing. I replaced two of them with new Napco (bigger) panels out of my own pocket because I thought I might have done something wrong.

I thought you were ripping them out anyway? You mentioned a total lack of support from DMP in the past