Shoutout to the Wiegand keypad on a 1998 panel that ate my whole Tuesday

Everyone says old gear is plug and play, but I burned 5 hours on a customer's ancient panel in Gary, Indiana last Tuesday. The keypad read fine on the meter, so I kept swapping readers instead of checking the run itself. Turns out a splice in the crawlspace had corrosion I couldn't see, and the voltage sag only showed up under load when the door strike fired. The popular opinion is to just rip out old systems and quote a full swap, but this lady has a working setup and a tight budget. The fix was a 20 cent connector and 10 minutes of actual work after 5 hours of guessing. Am I wrong for thinking we should meter under load first instead of selling every old panel down the river?

1 comments

Log in to join the discussion

Log In

1 Comment

jamieh7623d ago

Learned that lesson the hard way too, now I always throw a load on it before I touch anything else. Meter the run with the strike firing, wiggle the splices while you watch the voltage, and nine times out of ten the problem shows itself. Corrosion in a crawlspace is the worst because it reads fine until something actually pulls amps through it. You did right by that lady, a 20 cent fix beats a sales pitch every time. Swapping panels just because they're old is lazy troubleshooting, and half these old systems will outlive the new junk anyway.

4