TIL a bad ground wire on a DSC panel cost me 4 hours

I was troubleshooting a keypad that kept randomly rebooting on a job in Springfield last Tuesday. Checked power, replaced the battery, even swapped the keypad itself. Turned out it was a loose ground screw on the main board that I skipped during the initial hookup. Has anyone else burned a whole afternoon hunting something that simple?

2 comments

2 Comments

william8161d ago

And that ground screw has a way of being the last thing you think about too. I had a similar nightmare on a Vista 20p a few years back where the panel kept blasting the siren randomly at 2 AM. Turned out the ground was just barely loose and the humidity that night made it flake out. Now I torque every ground screw with a little screwdriver before I even power up the board. Saves me from kicking myself later.

chen.jenny14h ago

Yeah a buddy of mine had almost the exact same thing happen with his DSC panel. He chased ghosts for a week before he found the ground wire was just sitting in the terminal, not even snug. Now he uses a little dab of nail polish on the screw after he torques it, so he can see if it ever backs out.