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Had a total panel lockout on a job in Tempe yesterday
Was finishing a retrofit in a small office, and the main control panel just froze up, no keypad response at all. I pulled the transformer plug for a full minute, but it stayed dead. Ended up finding a tiny jumper wire from the old system that was still shorting the data bus. Cut it out, powered back on, and everything came up clean. Anyone run into a ghost short like that before?
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granthunt6mo ago
Used to think a full power cycle fixed everything. That ghost short changed my mind real quick. How'd you finally spot that jumper wire?
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the_piper6mo ago
Was it tucked under some tape or just out in the open? @granthunt, mine was a tiny jumper someone left across two terminals on an old board. The whole panel kept acting weird, even after resets. I only found it because I got fed up and started pulling every single wire off one by one to test. The voltage looked fine until that specific circuit was isolated. It's crazy how something so small can cause so much trouble.
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amy_west4mo ago
My personal favorite was a single strand of copper from a stripped wire. It was maybe an inch long, just sitting in the bottom of a control box. Every time the door closed, the vibration made it dance onto the terminals and blow a fuse. Took me three fuses and a lot of swearing to catch the little ghost in the act. I felt so dumb when I finally saw it.
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granthunt6mo ago
Oh man, telling me. I had one where a panel was just dead silent after a power cycle. Drove me nuts for an hour. Turned out to be a single stripped data wire, maybe half an inch long, that had fallen behind the cabinet and was laying across the terminals. It was from a deleted motion sensor. Looked like a piece of trash, but it locked the whole thing up solid. Those leftover bits will get you every time.
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