Loading…
24
My first boss made me ohm out every zone by hand, now I just watch the screen and I miss the old way
When I started in this trade back in 1996, we did every single zone check with a multimeter and a clipboard. I remember crawling through an attic in Tucson in July, sweating through my shirt, checking each wire run one at a time because my boss would not let us trust the panel readout. It took me almost 4 hours to verify 32 zones on a bank job, and if one was off I had to walk the whole run again to find it. These days I hook up my laptop and the software shows me every zone resistance in about 90 seconds. It is faster, sure, but I learned something on those long crawls that I do not think the new guys pick up. I can walk into a building now and just feel where a wire is probably damaged before I even test it. The meter taught me how the copper actually behaves when a staple gets driven through it. Any of you older installers feel like the new test gear made us a little lazy on the troubleshooting side, or is it just me?
0 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In0 Comments
No comments yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this discussion.