atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Security, Alarms and Paging Horror Stories

Ok you alarm guys(and gals...sorry Bunnie, No ring generator needed here ), this board is full of the Horror stories on the phone side of things and I thought it might be interesting to hear some of the bad situations you all have run into doing alarms.

One of ours that sticks out in my mind...

Had one of our techs working at a home where the fire alarm had been falsing out repeatedly. The customer would always do a reset on the system before our tech arrived so it was impossible for him to determine which of 15 or so smokes was falsing out. Only thing he could do short of replacing all of them was take the smokes down and blow the dust out and clean them. He disconneted the siren while he was working and forgot to hook it back up when he left. Next morning the owner was in the shower when the alarm went off again, which of course he did not hear. The fire department showed up, saw the cars, lights and TV on, and after getting no response began beating at the door to get in. About this time the owner gets out of the shower and hears what he thinks is a burgular beating his door down and rushes downstairs with his shotgun. He nearly laid the Firemen out before everybody figured out was going on. Not a very good situation to say the least.

I always remove the siren fuse or pull the wire off the terminal while I am working on the systems too. That's why I like the systems that supervise the siren and I make a point of making sure there are no troubles showing on the keypad before I leave. It is so easy to forget to hook that back up, been there, done that.

One that sticks out in my mind;
When I was a service tech for another company, I was dispatched to go check out a burglary and why their system failed to work. I arrived at the home to survey the damage. The customer's 67 vet parked in the unprotected attached garage was missing (keys were in the ignition) and there was a big hole through the drywall into the house. They used the tools that were in the garage to cut the interior wall and went between the studs into the house. I noticed the hole was cut low, it didn't go any higher than about 3 feet off the ground. Before they had "pet immune" detectors, we use to mask the lens and mount the detector mid wall so it would look straight out and up, creating a pet alley for the family dog. The theives obviously knew this and they crawled through the whole house and cleaned out all their valueables within reach. They had a lot of family heirloom jewellery stolen. This was the last time the alarm company, and myself, installed a "pet alley" detector!

My mother had a large house built with my stepfather, they had their electricain (friend of my stepfather)who was also an alarm guy pre wire the whole house, voice,data, fire, cctv, and alarm. to make a long story short he never finsihed the job and just dumped all cables into a utility closest, so I got the task of figureing evrything out, it Took me 5 days to tone out all wiring, another three to figure out the alarm runs (most were not home runs) I think I had a total of 24 zones with 5 keypads, 12 motions, 22 glass break, and I do not even know how many reed switchs, it was all the doors, interior and exterior and any window that opened. I have to say now that it is done the system is working great and the house is well covered, but what a mess to get it done.

Best I heared was at a very expensive hotel which was about to open here in Cardiff, Wales, the boys had been changing the wiring of the fire emergency break glasses on a Friday. On the next Monday morning workmen arrived to find the whole hotel was soaking wet, and the roof was open. Turns out an apprentice who was supposed to be changing the wiring of fire break glasses had also changed the wiring of the green door access break glasses which left all doors windows and, more importantly, the roof open all weekend when it lashed down.
Very Costly.

Back in the late 80’s while I was with another company we kept getting false fire alarms from a residence for no apparent reason. ( This was long before event buffers were thought of )
We decided to change the panel and communicator with brand new equipment. While we had the old panel removed the fire department called to verify that the alarm they had just received was false.

The monitoring company verified they had just received an alarm and received a few more as we were speaking on the telephone.

What had happened was that someone somewhere had entered the wrong account number in their panel that just happened to report to the same receiver line as ours.

Thank Heaven for event buffers !!!

That last post made me remember another one:

I was assigned to meet the new home owners of a place that had a monitored security system in it. I arrived with the paper work, called the monitoring station and put the system out of service using the info from the paper work. Monitoring station verified the address I was working at, all appeared good. Started to train the new users and they were very timid about the system to start with (late seniors). During my training, I push the medical button on the keypad and a short time later an ambulance shows up. The new owners were now scared to death to use the system and I was three shades of red due to embarrassment. Turns out there was two system numbers, an old one that I found and a newer one that was still in service!

I made it a point from then on to go into programming and check to make sure the system number matched my paper work.