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Ditched the hardwired keypads for wireless after a frustrating retrofit
I used to swear by hardwired panels, but this old house in Cincinnati had walls like concrete. Ran 3 runs of 22/4 and it took me a full Saturday just to fish one cable through the attic. Then I tried a wireless 2GIG on the next job and had the whole system live in under 2 hours. The reliability gap is smaller than I thought too, plus the battery life on the sensors surprised me. Has anyone else switched for retrofit jobs and never looked back?
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rubyschmidt2mo ago
...and honestly that's the thing I keep coming back to, how many of those hardwired systems you've installed actually needed to be hardwired? I mean sure, commercial stuff is different, but for residential retrofit jobs it feels like we're all just stuck in old habits sometimes. The real question is what happens five years down the road when a wireless sensor starts acting flaky and the homeowner calls you back out to a house where you can't just swap a wire and be done with it. Have you had any of those situations yet where a wireless connection dropped or a sensor just died on you, and how much of a pain was it to track down the problem? Because that's the part that still scares me a little, not the install but the troubleshooting.
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